Infrastructure Planning (Electricity Storage Facilities) Order 2020

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that introduction to this document. I am no great expert in power supply, but I find it interesting that the Government still see a difference between power generation and power generation and storage. They both generate power, but one of them takes the power when it is not being used and stores it, as in pumped storage.

As the Minister said, it is pretty unlikely that there will be any pumped storage of any significance in England, because the geography does not really suit. I was interested in her remarks about what I understood to be pumped hydro offshore. If that is really something that we should be looking at it has even greater potential for environmental damage, because presumably you would be using salt water rather than fresh water. I can see a lot of people not liking to have to create a new salt water lake somewhere in England, and I hope that that never happens.

It would be helpful for us in considering this to hear from the Minister exactly where the other storage will come from. She quite rightly said that there would be enormous demand for power storage in future, because of how we will be using electric cars and other electrical vehicles, including electric trains. One of the big potentials for power storage is in using people’s car batteries at night, provided that there was some kind of control system, so the power can be put back before people want to use their cars in the morning. It seems that there will be an enormous demand for storage, which must take into account when there is no wind and it is dark, so there is no solar energy.

I question whether this measure will be sufficient. I have no problem with the order in itself, but I worry about whether we will have enough in future and what the options are. I am sure, when the Minister comes to respond, she can put me right on all those things.