Grid Scale Energy Storage - missing an opportunity?

Grid Scale Energy Storage is predicted to be a £100 Billion global industry by 2015.

Energy Storage helps businesses, the economy and the environment.

1. Storing electricity reduces costs, by storing energy generated off peak and selling during times of very high demand, the average cost of energy is reduced.


2. Green technologies like Solar, Wind and Tidal don't produce power when it is required.  Large Scale Storage make these technologies far more viable.


3. Reducing the demand for energy generation at peak times means that the most inefficient generators won't need to be used.  These generators produce the most emissions per megawatt.


4. Grid Scale Storage is a truly global industry, suppliers will have opportunities almost everywhere.  The potential to export knowledge, products and service is huge.

Hopefully with all of this potential the government and our energy suppliers will invest the time and money required to meet our storage needs now and in the future.

 

The Green Book - good for the environment, bad for business

The Green Book: New Directions for Liberals in Government (http://www.green-book.org.uk) brings together 27 leading Liberal Democrats and sympathetic experts to propose radical and innovative new directions for the Liberal Democrats.

Although the full book is not available yet, the introduction and chapters give strong clues as the direction.  More "Green" taxes, hard targets for manufacturers and a reliance on community based generation and importing electricity from our European partners.

Unfortunately for businesses, this reads as higher costs.  Distributed, community generation schemes are not efficient, and will require backup sources to meet the peaks of daily demand.  Importing electricity just moved the pollution to another country.  Great for emissions targets, but higher energy losses equal higher prices.

Energy storage is the biggest issue for Green energy, and one which hold great financial rewards, unfortunately it does seem to deserve a chapter.

 

Overcharging - Faulty Meters

If the meter is faulty, then the supplier is never going to get things right, for example, the meter could record night as day and vice versa, sometimes to the clients benefit, sometimes not.

Many meters, especially larger supplies, have a multiplier fitted.  This means that for every kWh the meter reads, you have actually used 10, 20, 50 or 100 units.  If the multiplier on the meter doesn't match the multiplier on the bill, the error could be anything from double to 100 times the amount of energy you've actually used.  Again this can work both ways, if you have a site which is using much more or much less energy than you'd expect, then checking the meter is a good place to start.