Great British Energy Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Murray of Blidworth

Committee stage
Monday 13th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Murray, for Amendments 85D and 85E, which are focused on the issue of renewable energy curtailment. I must repeat, as I said earlier, that this debate is, in essence, about technologies, rather than the appropriate use of the directions in Clause 6. However, I assure the noble Lord that we are determined to increase significantly the deployment of short-term and long-term duration electricity storage to reduce curtailment.

I, too, was present in the debate on energy storage last Thursday, which was very interesting. My noble friend Lady Gustafsson recognised then that a variety of energy storage technologies would be needed to achieve net zero. That includes technologies such as lithium batteries and pumped hydropower storage—which can deploy at different scales and provide output over different lengths of time—and it can include emerging technologies, such as liquid air energy storage and flow batteries. Low-carbon hydrogen, too, can act as a low-carbon flexible generating technology and provide very long duration energy storage.

Today, around 7 gigawatts’ worth of grid-scale electricity storage is operational in Great Britain. This is made up of 2.8 gigawatts of pumped hydrogen and 4.3 gigawatts of grid-scale lithium battery storage. I add that we have announced a long-duration energy support scheme. We will publish a technical document in February. Applications will open in the second quarter, and we hope that the first agreements under the cap and floor system will take place in early 2026. It will be technology neutral, and it will be for projects that could not be built without the cap and floor system.

There are some developments in train: SSE, for instance, is doing exploratory tunnelling in the north of Scotland for pumped-storage hydro. Highview Power has reached FID in terms of liquid air energy storage near Carrington. Points on curtailment costs are well made; we see it as a key priority to accelerate network infrastructure to increase capacity on network and reduce constraints.

I do not think there is a lacuna; the Bill is constructed in the way it is. We have Clause 3 and the strategic statement of priorities in Clause 5. I hope I have reassured the noble Lord that the substantive point he raises is important and accepted by the Government.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply and am provided with some reassurance that the Government take storage seriously. However, for the reasons given by my noble friend Lord Ashcombe, the cost of curtailing output is presently substantial, as the Minister conceded. As my noble friends Lord Hamilton and Lord Offord pointed out, the difficulty with the current structure of the Bill is that we are not moving fast enough to secure sufficient storage capacity such that we do not need to make such large curtailment payments.

I urge the Minister to consider inserting in the Bill, at the very least, some form of requirement for reporting in relation to curtailment payments, which would encourage the market in storage capacity. With that, I am content to withdraw my amendment.