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

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, for adeptly chairing the sessions that led to this report. More than that, since she retires from our committee this month, she deserves congratulations on being so effective and benign throughout the last four years.

Today’s debate raises serious issues which cannot be addressed without substantial resources and long-term planning. The backdrop is, of course, that the simplest and cheapest way that the UK can move towards net zero is to exploit energy from the sun and from wind. We need to get more energy from these clean sources than the total amount we generate now, because we need to replace the energy now coming from fossil fuels that is used for transport and heating. Therefore, by 2050 we will be far more dependent on electricity than we are today. So dependent are our cities on electricity already that there would be utter social breakdown within two or three days if there was a complete power cut.

In going carbon free as our contribution to avoiding the global mega risk of extreme climate change, we have exposed ourselves to a new risk: namely, that electricity supply could fail during sunless cold spells in the winter. Coping with this new risk is the theme of this report. It is clear that major annual investment is crucial if the UK is to achieve its net-zero ambition by 2050 and removing the associated risk of that would require the substantial extra expenditure discussed in the report. There will be a strong temptation to spend less and slow down the whole decarbonisation programme, partly on the grounds that the UK’s current contribution to global CO₂ emissions is less than 2%, so the global benefit will be minimal if other countries fail to achieve net zero by 2050 or have not even set themselves such a strict target. To many citizens, this will seem just the kind of project that can be progressively cut and deferred in favour of more urgent and local problems.

My main point is that there are other quite different cogent reasons—indeed, compelling ones—as to why the UK should build up an energy store to be drawn on when the system that normally powers the electric grid falls short of our needs. I refer to the consequences of, for instance, cyberattacks on nuclear power stations, sabotage of cables, or failures—either accidental or malign—created in the crucial machinery that controls the grid and is coupling to energy generated by wind or sun.

Even if we never contemplated the kind of aggression which Ukraine is now experiencing, we surely cannot rule out cyberattacks on power stations, sabotage or similar interventions which close down large parts of the grid. There is bound to be a delay in restoring power after such events so, to bridge such a delay, there needs to be an emergency store of energy which will prevent possible utter social breakdown.

The optimum infrastructure needed to cope with these emergencies would not be quite the same as what is needed to cope with calm, sunless winters, but there is plainly an overlap. Most people would feel far more motivated to support long-term energy storage if it also contributed to the just as important task of rendering us more resilient to technological breakdowns or malign attacks. The probability of those attacks is hard to estimate, as is the probability of other failures, but it will surely increase with time in our unstable world. Most people worry more about these than the projected effect of climate change, which motivates the net-zero target.

I suggest that the risks stemming from the shift towards solar and wind energy, which are the themes of this report, should be added to the already threatening risks from advanced technologies, especially as there may be an overlap in the benefits of particular measures to counteract both of them. There is more chance of getting these measures if they have two reasons for being done, rather than just one.