Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, what steps his Department is taking to provide support for communities that host (a) battery storage facilities and (b) other energy infrastructure.

The Government believes that communities are providing a service to the country when they host clean energy infrastructure, so there needs to be benefit for them. On 21 May, the Government published a working paper on community benefits and shared ownership of low carbon energy infrastructure and is the process of reviewing responses. We will consider the appropriate technological scope of a mandatory scheme for community benefits, including whether such a scheme should cover grid-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS).