Meeting of the Parliament 11 November 2015
I would really like to make these points. I am very sorry but I need to make progress.
That expert group should comprise senior officials and it should be specifically tasked with looking at flexibility, incorporating storage, interconnection and other methods of providing flexibility in the grid. In other words, it would look at the issue in the round.
As many members have indicated, the requirement for more storage will not be optional. It will prove to be essential—a sine qua non of a system that has more renewables and in which the capacity margin is parlously low, as we have seen of late. We will also need storage—not at the transmission level of pumped storage but, as members have said, at distribution and, indeed, household level. Members talked about battery storage and lithium batteries, liquid compressed air, hydro storage, domestic thermal storage and other forms of storage.
I refer again to the Scottish Renewables report because it refers to an East Lothian-based company, Sunamp. The report says that the company has
“developed the SunampPV system which is designed to store excess electricity from a solar PV array as heat. It can later deliver fast-flowing hot water on demand. Sunamp are set to install over 700 units of SunampPV and other Sunamp heat battery products in over 1,000 homes across Falkirk, Edinburgh and the Lothians.”
I have previously described the company, which I have visited, as the Scottish answer to Tesla.
We have encouraged various activities through our local energy challenge fund, some in Mr Torrance’s area, some in East Lothian and others throughout the country.
We need the UK Government to recognise the key role that storage has to play as we move forward. As Mr Stevenson said, it is absurd that we need 1.5GW of diesel power, at a cost of £436 million. That is a temporary and polluting solution that leaves no long-term legacy. We have the pumped storage resources in Scotland. Those should be used by the UK, which should find a method of incentivising that use. There are only 3GW of pumped storage in Britain; in comparison, Austria has 8GW and Germany and France have twice as much as the UK.
There have been useful contributions to the debate from across the chamber. It is a topic that we will come back to on many future occasions, and rightly so. I thank Mr MacKenzie again for bringing the debate to the chamber this evening.
Meeting closed at 17:54.