Mike Wood

People in my constituency are worried. They are worried by the constant stream of applications for new battery energy storage systems in and around the villages across the constituency—from Kinver to Swindon, Hinksford, Wombourne, Lower Penn and the edge of Kingswinford. Their worries were not exactly alleviated by the response the Prime Minister gave to my question last month. He did not give the impression that the Government understand residents’ concerns and some of the reasons for those concerns. Lower Penn in South Staffordshire is a lovely village with a population of just under 1,000, and it felt like pretty much all of them were in the village hall for the public meeting in February. At least seven battery sites have been either approved or proposed in or close to that small village. The same is happening in villages across South Staffordshire. As I have been sitting in the Chamber for this debate, I have received another email from the planning authority inviting me to speak on one these applications, which are coming through at such a rate. That reflects the position across the country. There are 121 operational battery energy storage systems in the United Kingdom, but over 1,500 more are in the pipeline, so we really are at a tipping point, but the planning and regulatory systems have not yet caught up. That is why we need action. As has been said, such batteries have a low failure rate, but sometimes they go wrong, just as they do in mobile phones and electric vehicles. That is why airlines tell us we cannot charge our mobile phone battery while we are on a flight, and it is why Parliament has decided that electric vehicles cannot be charged in the underground car park. It is not because the risk is high; it is because the consequences of things going wrong can be catastrophic. Whereas a mobile phone may have a capacity of 15 to 18 watt hours and an electric vehicle battery perhaps 80 to 100 kW hours, the site in Tilbury—the site of the fire earlier this year, which I think the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) referred to—when completed will have a capacity of about 600 MW hours. To put it another way, that site will be the equivalent of 33 million iPhone batteries. As we see an increase in these sites, we know from basic statistics that there will be more fires on top of those we have already had this year in Tilbury, Cirencester and Aberdeenshire. We therefore need to ensure that our systems are properly adapted and modernised to reflect those risks. The risk of a fire is not only about the potential danger to human life—for both those who may be nearby and the firefighters who are sent to bring those fires under control over what may be 24 or 48 hours —but about our local natural environments.