Industry body Scottish Renewables has launched ‘Storage Network’ this week, alongside a white paper titled Energy Storage – The Basics to bring together those with an interest in the rapidly-growing sector.
A spokesman explained: “It is of vital importance to our energy system that we have a strong energy storage sector to complement Scotland’s growing renewable electricity and heat sectors and to increase our energy security.
“Being able to store when it is generated and deploy it is needed would help to maximise our use of renewables generation, cut carbon emissions further, and revolutionise the way we use energy.
“The global market for large-scale energy storage has been estimated at almost £20 billion by 2022. Scotland has already taken a lead in the development of technologies such as grid-scale batteries, which are currently being used on some of our remote islands, and pumped storage hydro, but there is far more we could do. This new network aims to keep that progress going.”
Some of the technologies covered in the white paper include:
Hydrogen fuel cells – building on knowledge from Aberdeen’s hydrogen bus fleet and two Scottish universities who are at the forefront of research into this area;
Large-scale heat storage – for which potential has already been identified in disused mines in the central belt and abandoned railway tunnels in Glasgow, and;
Supercapacitors – which range in size from miniscule to extremely large, and can be used in fractions of a second to balance electricity grids.
Scottish Renewables’ new Storage Network is open to members who are interested in energy storage, or those who want to get involved in this area in future
Pixie Energy is an incubator and a facilitator of strategic research and project work, focusing on energy regulation, policy and markets at the local and national level. Find out more about Pixie Energy