Energy storage could cut household energy bills

Reaching the potential for energy storage could deliver savings of up to £50 a year on an average consumer energy bill through a system-wide saving of up to £2.4bn a year by 2030, according to a new report funded by three utilities, E.ON, SSE and Scottish Power, as well as the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Scottish Government. But such a move would require an improved regulatory environment for storage.

The analysis, carried out over 12 months by the Carbon Trust and Imperial College London, explored two example applications of distributed storage, which highlighted a series of barriers to deployment that have created market failure for storage. The report makes recommendations on how to overcome these barriers.

Andrew Lever, Director of Innovation at the Carbon Trust said: ‘Energy storage has long been seen as a panacea for a low carbon energy sector in the UK, offering a suite of services to balance the system, make electricity networks more efficient and help the UK to meet its carbon targets at the lowest cost. But storage turns conventional knowledge on its head as it doesn’t fit neatly into existing regulatory frameworks, which have been designed around an energy system where power is supplied to consumers from large centralised power stations.’

Meanwhile, a project to use energy storage to optimise energy requirements for industrial and commercial sites is now underway, with plans to commission an installation at a site in the north of England. The Battery Optimisation and Storage System project (BOSS) creates on-site energy storage capacity with repurposed batteries from Renault electric vehicles. Led by EDF Energy, in partnership with Route Monkey and Connected Energy, a subsidiary of Future Transport Systems, BOSS is part-funded by Innovate UK.

The project will integrate a 50 kWh E-STOR energy storage unit provided by Connected Energy with a site energy management system developed by Route Monkey. The modular E-STOR system, which can be scaled to the requirements of each specific site, uses EV batteries from Renault that have completed their automotive life. These ‘second life’ batteries are said to typically retain up to 75% of their energy storage capabilities.