Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent assessment he has made of the potential merits of increasing investment in pumped hydro storage facilities.

We recognise that electricity storage technologies, including pumped hydro storage, provide an important source of flexibility to our energy system. We currently have around 3GW of storage capacity on our system, of which the vast majority is pumped hydro storage. The Electricity System Operator outlines that, by 2050, there could be 12-29 GW of total storage capacity on our system.

In our Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan, published in July 2017 (and updated in October 2018), Government and Ofgem set out a range of actions to remove barriers to electricity storage. Our work seeks to enable fair access to energy markets in order to create a best in class regulatory framework for the sector and includes several important reforms to our electricity market, including to the balancing mechanism, capacity market and balancing services, which serve to sharpen incentives to invest in storage.

We will continue to engage with storage developers, including those of pumped hydro projects, to understand how to facilitate these technologies whilst ensuring best value for consumers and fair competition between different flexibility technologies.