Long-duration Energy Storage (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Science and Technology Committee on this report. It really hits the nail on the head in the need to think about things. One thing that always amuses me is that people keep talking about doing these things “at pace”. Surely they mean “speedily”. A pace can be slow as well as fast, so it is an ambiguous word to use.

Anyway, enough of that. We all talk about transmission and central storage, not always but quite a bit, whereas living in the country I am only too aware of the importance of having electrical back-up. We have a diesel generator, which cuts in sometimes two, three or four times a year. We are not very far from London, only 60 miles, just off the A1, but nothing like that is reliable. We need reliability because, for us, internet communication is essential for filing stuff to the Government on time. If you are late, you get fined, so it is not an option.

The other thing about local storage is that it reduces the load on central systems. It does not necessarily have to be electric. I was just looking at heat batteries because I am putting something in in Scotland and thought they might be good because they use phase change materials to store the heat and you get it back when you want it. We should look at that sort of stuff.

How we use whatever energy source we are going to use is key. I want to focus on the problems of heavy-duty transport, particularly vans and lorries going out from depots, with everyone buying from central depots on the internet. They have problems with this, because fuel cells are not commercially viable or affordable. Electricity is an obvious thing, but in moving machinery batteries are not an option for much of the market—they have been tested and shown not to work. Two large companies are delaying putting them into effect although they were under pressure to do so; they are not buying them at the moment.

Another problem is that you cannot get power through the grid to distribution depots. One site was quoted tens of millions of pounds to get a sufficient supply. The planning system is blocking delivery of electric charging points, which are needed for a lot of stuff in northern and remote parts of the motorway and for A-roads. The planning system is blocking them because they want substations or need more heavy-duty copper cables. That is a big problem, so I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and support everything she was saying about prevarication in the planning system blocking a lot of stuff that will be needed in future.

Transport fleets have a problem in reducing their overall carbon emissions and modern adapted diesel engines are ideal for heavy transport. The problem is that the DfT is blocking the approval of hydrogen internal combustion engines, or H2ICEs. The technology was adopted by the EU in April 2024 but it is blocked over here and therefore cannot get research funding, grants or support from the Government. It also will not be approved by the DfT when trying to evaluate sites or companies in getting towards net-zero targets. The fact that this British modern technology in research is not eligible for support here means, I have been told, that a leading UK company is actively considering moving to the EU and the US because it will get subsidies and government support over there, and that saddens me.

Another part of the solution would be to generate the hydrogen near the depots. You would have wind farms and solar, say, next door to the depot, hydrolyse the hydrogen directly, and then it can be used there locally. Again, that takes the pressure off trying to centralise all these systems. Another area I heard about that is apparently not getting any government support is carbon-negative ways of generating hydrogen locally. They should be supporting innovative stuff such as that. As mentioned by several noble Lords, small modular reactors would also take local pressure off the grid. That would be very sensible. Many of these ideas are quick and affordable and it saddens me when I hear that the British Government have apparently given £188 million to Tesla over the last eight years. We could have been supporting innovation in the UK instead—that would be far more productive.

Another point that I was thinking of making, but I did not know whether I would have the time and I do not know whether my science is faulty, is that hydrogen has a much lower energy density than the hydrocarbon in natural gas. Therefore, you cannot just shove hydrogen down the gas system into houses for heating and all the things that system is used for at the moment because you will not get the same heat out at the other end from the same volume of gas. I do not know quite what is happening on that; I think there is a lot of research, and people talk about adapting boilers and all sorts of other wonderfully expensive ways of trying to get round the problem. Sometimes everyone thinks that there is a magic word that will solve all the problems, but very often that is not true. However, we need to get on with it. That is the most vital thing in this report.