With attention turning to the security of UK gas supplies following events in the Ukraine, industry is calling for government to produce a roadmap for energy storage.

The Energy & Utilities Alliance (EUA) has warned that as the political unrest continues, government should look again at increasing gas storage.

Mike Foster, chief executive of EUA said: “Even Energy Secretary Ed Davey has said that we need to take the situation ‘much more seriously’ as the continuing situation is a threat to Europe’s energy security.

“EUA has been lobbying the government to invest in additional UK gas storage and its unwillingness to do so may prove disastrous for consumers. In the UK we store less gas than other European countries and if President Putin’s threats to turn off the gas pipeline to the Ukraine is realised it would jeopardize supplies across Europe, resulting in a hike in prices which in turn would damage the economy.”

According to figures from 2013, the UK stores enough gas to last 20 days, in comparison with over 100 in France and six months in America, and relies heavily on foreign imports.

Among the solutions put forward to reduce dependence on foreign supply are energy efficiency measures, harnessing domestic shale gas reserves and renewables.

However, as the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (ImechE) highlighted in its recent report, Energy storage: The missing link in the UK’s energy commitments, the challenge of renewable sources arises from the fact that the wind does not always blow, the sun does not always shine and the waves are not always in motion at times when consumers demand electricity.

“On the other hand the converse is also true, in that consumer demand for power can be low when renewable energy sources are highly active,” the report continues. This issue of so-called ‘wrong time’ electricity generation leads to challenges in balancing supply and demand across the power transmission and distribution system.

With no long-term means of storage, such renewable generators are often simply switched off.

To enable wrong-time electricity generated from intermittent renewable sources to be put to use at times when consumer demand is higher than baseload provision and renewables supply is at low levels, ImechE has given government the following recommendations:

1. Focus on heat and transport, as well as electricity. It is well understood that security of supply is crucial and that decarbonisation of the UK energy system desirable, but in contrast to past thinking it should not be confined to simply having sufficient electricity generating capacity to ‘keep the lights on’. With a growing amount of the UK’s fossil fuel supplies being imported, and rapidly increasing global competition for remaining resources, it is in the national interest to utilise freely available indigenous renewable resources for heat and transportation as well as electricity generation. Government needs to work with the engineering community to develop new and innovative systems that include energy storage.

2. Recognise that energy storage cannot be incentivised by conventional market mechanisms. It is unlikely that the nation’s long-term decarbonisation objectives will be met without significant deployment of energy storage capability, yet there are no plans to do this in the UK. To date very little public investment has been made in research, development and demonstrator activity and, as yet, there is no existing or proposed incentivisation scheme for energy storage deployment. In order to stimulate the sector and ensure that UK has the capability to deliver energy storage, as well as exploit emerging export opportunities, new public finance and business models are required to fund this key element of the nation’s future energy system.

3. The UK must reject its obsession with ‘cheapness’ in the energy sector. Despite current concern over rapidly increasing energy costs, and the reactive political promises that are unlikely to be fulfilled, it is evident that whatever form of energy is used in the UK, costs will have to continue to rise into the future. In comparison with other European countries, the UK has for decades focused on keeping energy prices artificially low, which has led to over-consumption of energy, while the necessary demand-side reduction measures have not been put in place. This attitude must change and an alternative culture be developed which recognises the value of energy and drives sustainable change in the nation’s energy system.