The British residential energy storage industry needs to avoid “false starts” which could result in “lots of inappropriately installed systems”, according to SunGift Enegy. Gabriel Wondrausch of Sungift Energy told Next Energy News that he was already concerned this could become a problem for the industry and its customers if it went unchecked.
Sungift, which designs, installs and distributes renewable energy systems, has “probably sent more storage systems back to the manufacturers than we’ve actually installed or put out through the gates,” Wondrausch, the company’s managing director, said.
A recent event organised by Solar Media titled “Enabling the growth of a residential energy storage market in the UK” brought together participants from across the value chain of the nascent industry. Representatives of storage manufacturers including the UK’s Moixa and Powervault and Germany’s Sonnenbatterie and ASD Sonnenspeicher, sat down with trade groups British Photovoltaics Association (BPVA) and Electricity Storage Network, law firm Eversheds, research firm IHS and others.
Participants were asked at the outset of the event to pick one priority area that the UK energy storage industry should concentrate on in enabling such a market to get going. The 15 groups represented brought a range of ideas to the table. Jerry Hamilton, director of renewables and energy solutions at electrical wholeseller Rexel, agreed with Wondrausch’s assertion that the avoidance of a “false start” was essential.
Hamilton added that the initial installers of energy storage in the UK will need their “hands held to make sure they’re doing it right”. Hamilton went on to say that training installers to understand the role of battery management in a system is crucial in electricity storage – as opposed to thermal storage – would be essential. Otherwise, he said “…batteries will get a bad name very quickly and it’s not their fault, we need to understand this is not just filling it up and emptying it”.
‘Clear policy direction needed’
Meanwhile, Jonathan Cohen, who is a lawyer in the cleantech space at Eversheds and Anthony Price of the Electricity Storage Network industry group, both agreed that a lack of clear policy direction from the UK government could hold industry back.
“If there’s one thing I’d like to see it’s a clear government roadmap or strategic policy going forward about where storage is going to be in the forthcoming years, and I guess by that I mean where does it sit in the regulatory system?
“Currently storage doesn’t have an asset class of its own, [bar regulation] so we need some certainty on those things which will inform consequently business models that storage can be rolled out from,” Cohen said.
Price was more blunt and said that so far, there had been no clear strategy from the UK government – which in the past few weeks has slashed renewable energy subsidies and admitted to an overspend on the Levy Control Framework which controls much of its ‘green budget’.
“…The key point, certainly for the UK, is to uncover what the national strategy for storage should be. That could be a strategy, or having no strategy. It’d be as useful to know there is no strategy as knowing there is one,” Price said.
The event will be covered in greater detail over the coming weeks on PV Tech Storage and Solar Media’s UK publishing channels including Solar Power Portal and Next Energy News.
