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

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, this is a very good report by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, and I thank all our great staff, but I regret that I cannot be as complimentary about the Government’s response. The rules of the House of Lords prohibit a committee from expressing urgency by visual design or typographically. Perhaps the committee thought that “get on with it” was sufficient, but I do not consider that the sense of urgency that we found on the matter was reflected in the response.

The position is simple: windmills have a 97% or 98% availability rate. These figures are only from the internet, and I would be happy to be corrected by more knowledgeable noble Lords. The problem is that failures occur mainly when the wind dies down. Then, it happens to all windmills in a given area at once. Can the Minister confirm that this very nearly happened yesterday, which would have made a dramatic opener for this debate?

The Germans have a word for the winter phenomenon of a Dunkelflaute—mentioned by our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Brown—which seems to have entered the English language. It is a period of time—several days—of flat calm and low clouds, in which neither windmills nor solar panels can produce much power. There is very little that anyone can do about it. One has to hand it to our German cousins for producing such a fine onomatopoeic word.

As a country, we have decided that we will deliver a zero-emission electricity grid at some stage. The committee has tried to point out the complexity of doing so and of providing a back-up system without billions of pounds of expenditure; it is impossible to do it at reasonable cost.

One solution is that we should have a fleet of nuclear power stations. The trouble is that we know that, but we are not happy with the risk of the small modular reactor. We should be happy, because we know what the risk is now: it is different from and smaller than the risk unknowable from a hydrogen-based solution. Another solution is to start fracking. The 0.5 level on the Richter scale, which must not be exceeded, is less than the vibration caused by 10 Lords a-leaping, and we survive that at Christmas every year.

In the 1970s, this country and its population were used to power cuts. Our electricity was dominated by coal and the country was dependent on unionised coal miners doing their hard work in low places. They were suffering conditions with no end of industrial disease, in addition to mesothelioma, for which we are paying even now. We were used to and prepared for power cuts. I was told that, in 1973, during the end of the three-day week, the Department of Industry—working for Tony Benn as Secretary of State, the late father of my friend, the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate—had to negotiate a solution to the problems caused by the bankruptcy of BSA and the motorcycle industry. The meetings took a long time, but the department could not show any lights that proved that they were working on an off day. So they set up trestle-tables in the gents’ loo at the department, confident that there would be no female lawyers or executives in any of the teams negotiating, and that they would not be discovered as there were no outside windows. The point is that the department was ready to solve the problem; we have lost that ability today.

We are a changed society and many more times more dependent on electricity now than 50 years ago. I am not sure what today’s teenagers will say when they cannot recharge their iPhones, nor indeed how they will say it. I suppose that they will be forced into conversation with their parents, who will moan that they cannot recharge their electric cars either. We do not have candles stored in every house, nor matches to light them. The point is that we are many times more vulnerable to the effects of power cuts than we were 50 years ago, and, at the same time, many times more likely to get one thanks to a Dunkelflaute affecting our windmills. They will stop, and no amount of political hot air will restart them. Unfairly, the Government will be blamed for the weather; their actual crime will be not having a decent back-up system in place to save us from this utterly predictable disaster. A few days’ interruption 50 years ago was possible to cope with then.

Our report pointing out this urgency was able to generate a government response identifying the process to develop an answer. No doubt, it is an impeccable process. We do not need a process; we need a solution. Otherwise, we will do what Governments often do: seize on an expensive solution that looks like action and blame their predecessors for the problem. The electorate will not believe the politicians, and, as usual, the electorate will be right. The problem comes from our decision to have a zero-emission grid, but given current technology, there is no simple solution. The only thing we can say is: “Get on with it”.