The change in the law should make it much easier for energy storage schemes to get planning permission, to attract funding more easily, and enable them to be built more quickly. The recent UK Battery Storage Project Database Report by suggested the UK has more than 13.5GW of battery storage projects in the pipeline.
The changes to planning legislation for larger energy storage projects were first announced back in October 2019 to allow planning applications to be determined without going through the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) process.
The challenges for new standalone energy storage projects are as follows: revenue uncertainty – the contract terms available for many of the available revenue streams are short in duration; at four years, the term of EFR contract is the longest. As a consequence, projects have to manage greater revenue uncertainty over the lifetime of the project.
Electricity can be stored in a variety of ways, including in batteries, by compressing air, by making hydrogen using electrolysers, or as heat. Storing hydrogen in solution-mined salt caverns will be the best way to meet the long-term storage need as it has the lowest cost per unit of energy storage capacity.
Historical weather records indicate that it will be necessary to store large amounts of energy (some 1000 times that provided by pumped hydro) for many years. What electricity storage will be needed, and what are the alternatives?
It means that most electricity storage projects, with the exception of pumped hydro schemes, can be determined through the Town and Country Planning Act, by local planning authorities. In effect this means that planning applications for projects over 50MW should, theoretically, be decided in between eight and 13 weeks depending on their size.