Energy: Storage

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, battery technology could offer huge benefits to the way that we both generate and store electricity and could provide better capacity to our electricity system in the UK. It could also enable us better to deal with the more intermittent nature of some renewable energy. The work done by Imperial College indicates that the savings per annum for producing electricity in this country could run at between £1 billion and £2 billion a year, so it is very important that we get the regulatory system right.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lord, the Government recently announced a special tariff addition to people’s electricity bills to cover emergency stand-by generation to meet the peaks in—I think this was the wording—“weekday evenings”. Apparently, they are particularly targeting coal-fired power stations and nuclear power stations. How do you switch them on and off just like that for a peak in one evening?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, I do not think that there is any intention to switch nuclear power stations on and off to cover short-term peaks in demand; coal-fired generation, on the other hand, is much more flexible in that regard. The whole point of these new smart systems is to allow much better demand management over the peaks and troughs of energy demand so that, hopefully, we will need less generation capacity in the future than we have done in the past.