My Lords, I support the amendment tabled in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Stephen and Lord Teverson. It is an excellent amendment, and had I been administratively competent enough, I am sure we would have tried to add our name to it because it raises an important aspect of this energy trilemma that we are trying to solve. As the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, eloquently pointed out, it is sadly missing from the Bill. This amendment or a similar amendment would be an excellent addition to it and would help to make it clear that this will be a very important part of the energy system. The reason it belongs in this Bill is because it is a significant move towards supporting the greater use of variable sources of electricity. As has been pointed out by previous speakers, one clear way of addressing the issues and challenges that variability creates is through the use of storage.
It is often—I think wrongly—stated that electricity cannot be stored. That is incorrect. It can be and is stored in many ways. We have heard of some of them today. Dinorwig is an amazing example. It was a government-funded public work, and it has been operated very successfully by a number of private companies. It is a jewel in the crown of our grid and provides fantastic, very fast and very efficient back-up at times of need.
However, there are many other sources. Hydro pump storage is not just in North Wales. There is an awful lot of it in Scotland, where it is a very reliable and well integrated source of renewable energy that has become at one with the environment in which it is located. These are technologies that were built in the 1950s and are still serving us today. They are amazing examples of what renewable energy can achieve. With the renewed interest in storage, a plethora of new approaches is emerging. I read with interest that GE, the wind turbine manufacturers, has launched a turbine that it is calling the “Brilliant” turbine. It is 2.5 megawatts and has a chemical storage facility built in to smooth the curves when wind power is operating or not operating. Obviously, that is a statement from the manufacturers that they can see a commercial advantage to being able to provide storage to help deal with the variability of the energy supply.
The Leighton Buzzard project was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Stephen. This is a fascinating and great example of where Britain can really excel. It is fairly straightforward engineering excellence at its best. The challenge is to take electricity at times of high supply using a filtration system to separate out nitrogen and then to cool the nitrogen as a liquid. That
is the storage mechanism. Once it is heated and released, it can power a turbine. The great thing about the Leighton Buzzard project is that it is located next to a source of low-grade waste heat, which would otherwise be wasted, and that is helping to improve the efficiency of the system. These are exactly the sort of projects you can rely on the engineers and innovators of Britain to deliver. I really hope that we will see much more of such projects and more support for them.
The chemical project has also been mentioned—but I might have got this the wrong way round. The liquid air project is in Slough, and the chemical project—the 6 megawatt chemical battery, also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Stephen—is the one in Leighton Buzzard, so I apologise for the confusion. Nevertheless, those are two examples.
There is also a wide amount of pre-existing distributed storage available on the grid in the form of Economy 7 and storage heating. This is another aspect of storage that has been slightly forgotten. When we had our initial push for nuclear power and found that we had an overabundance of power in the night, when there was not much use for it, a parallel process was introduced to encourage householders to fit storage heaters in order to absorb that excess electricity at times when it was cheap and use it to heat their homes. I do not see why that should be forgotten. I think it has an essential part and could now, with the advances we have made in smart metering and the information that will be available to consumers, provide another form of storage.