Contribution
I agree that with the correct technology, those systems can provide local resilience.
The fundamental change to the core role of the energy system has been from efficiency to storage. How we achieve that future system is already well debated. We start with energy efficiency and insulation, then we move on to shifting the time of demands, and we can enhance that with intraday storage in some buildings. The way we actively control and manage the response to demands and our storage is the big question for the future electricity system.
Currently, moment-by-moment control is achieved technically using the A/C power itself as a signal. Control over longer time bases is co-ordinated and partially directed through markets. In the future, we expect markets to play a bigger part in our electricity system, working in shorter timeframes and in a more distributed way. When we think about resilience, the design of our economic and commercial energy system and the digital systems that enact it will be absolutely critical. The commercial energy system will be as critical as the physical one.
Whereas markets may be good for some resilience attributes such as flexibility and diversity, they are often bad for others, such as redundancy, continuity and headroom. Also, our new digital communications channels offer potential single points of failure for our system. This is a fundamental question of national security. In the light of a string of cyber-attacks, it is crucial that when our digital world fails, our heating, lights, sanitation and vehicles must not. Either our grid must not depend on signals such as dynamic pricing to keep working, or those signals must be multiple-fault tolerant. With distributed generators playing a larger role in future, avoiding cascade failures requires them to support graceful degradation instead of disconnecting in the face of uncertainty.
This dynamic, digitally enabled future can introduce other risks, not only for resilience but for social equity. It must not penalise those who cannot afford battery storage, and each internal system boundary and each new pricing location threatens overall value. Alongside markets, our systems must incorporate core features that function primarily in the public interest. The system must be resilient against market-induced price instability and commercial failures, both for our security and for those markets to function healthily.
That all misses the single largest and most novel component of our future energy system: clean, long-duration energy storage at scale—storage, not just for seconds through inertia, not just for minutes through demand-side response, and not just for a day or night through in-building storage, but intraweek and longer to ride through long stagnant weather events or other major disruptions. Today, our energy resilience is assured by the incredible flexibility and capacity of fuels: oil in transport and off-grid heat, and methane gas for heat in buildings and industry. Those fuels intrinsically store energy indefinitely and carry vast amounts of energy through simple infrastructure, such as pipes and tanks. Our gas system currently carries three times as much energy each year, and up to four times as much in a day as our total electricity system. It shares its energy storage capability with the electricity system through gas power stations, our core electricity resilience assets. We have found our dependency on gas to be a weakness, but only because we depend on it for our system’s strength.
So, we face a crux. How might we win the energy resilience prize, benefiting from the clean versatility of electricity and the stabilising, security-critical storage capability of fuel? There is one answer that the UK has itself pioneered. There is a fuel that is carbon-free and 100% interoperable with electricity, and capable of being manufactured from electricity and cleanly converted back into it again at will: hydrogen. The Government, and others, have spotted the unique potential of hydrogen to fuel a clean and secure future for British industry. I would argue that they could go further, enabling industrial renewal in and around national clusters, but also in our towns and suburbs. As we seek to secure a material supply chain, the UK could deploy our immense wind resource and become a circular economy material recovery superpower of Europe.
Over recent years, however, the debate has become paralysed by an either/or question. Electrification and hydrogen have been presented in some sectors as mutually exclusive. Hydrogen has been presented as scarce and expensive. Policy has been asking whether the answer in various sectors is electrification or hydrogen, but the design answer is resounding and simple: it is both. These two energy vectors are complementary, with hydrogen power stations able to provide our grid with headroom, responsive generation and inertia, and hydrogen storage able to provide our national asset of inter-day and inter-week energy storage. Our future electricity system needs hydrogen, and at a vast scale. The truth of the matter is that hydrogen will be as cheap and abundant as we design it to be.