Publication date: July 2012
This report looks at the future role of energy storage in the UK and analyses the potential of electricity storage to reduce the costs of electricity generation in our future energy system.
The UK government's commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 poses many challenges. Integrating significant levels of variable renewable generation and increasing levels of electrified demand, for example, will require greater degrees of flexibility in UK's electricity network in order to maintain supply-demand balance as we do today. While many recognize that energy storage has an important role to play in providing this system flexibility, the challenge has been to move the industry beyond a fairly conceptual debate.
In order to provide a useful framework and an initial quantitative fact base to stimulate the debate, the Carbon Trust commissioned this study in 2011 to address some of the key questions in relation to the future role of electricity storage in the UK.
- What are the benefits of storage across different time scales and different sectors of the system (from real time operation to investment time scale, considering generation, transmission and distribution sectors)?
- What type of storage delivers the highest value and where should it be placed on the network?
- What are the cost targets and scale of deployment?
This report, by the Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College, summarises the key findings of the study.
