Cynrychiolaeth gan Christopher Edwards
- Dyddiad cyflwyno
- 11 Medi 2024
- Cyflwynwyd gan
- Members of the public/businesses
I am strongly supportive of green energy. However wind and solar are intermittent and energy storage has to be dramatically improved if we are to become carbon neutral. Putting up a massive number of solar farms, often on high quality agricultural land is not the answer.The UK currently pays over £3bn pa to the owners of wind and solar farms to turn off their supply to the grid as the grid cannot cope with it. Currently we are limited to lithium battery storage which is extremely expensive and very short term. I chair a new company called The Heat Vault which is using a novel approach to energy storage in 50-100m wells, 3 metres apart. Excess heat is stored in the rock and excess electricity is turned into heat which is then stored. We can store very large amounts of energy for long periods of time. The way to assess this is via the so called levelised cost of storage. This is 100 for lithium battery and 0.6 for the Heat Vault. We have installed a Heat Vault Showcase just outside Stockholm. (Redacted) The future lies in using such storage and all new houses having solar roofs. With this approach we can still have Kent as the Garden of England and solve our most important problem of climate change.