Europe |
UK set to face future challenges
Both the UK’s hydropower and water supply industries face future changes. While long awaited government action is still needed to address important policy issues, plans are underway to construct new reservoirs, and questions are being asked about whether a new water strategy is now required
THE UK HYDROPOWER INDUSTRY is waiting on government action to implement a suitably supportive investment mechanism for the deployment of large scale, long duration storage projects, such as pumped storage. And in the interim, industry representatives are becoming increasingly vocal about the need to address such an important issue promptly. “Many other governments, including the US, India, France, Poland, the European Union, and Australia, are putting in place such policy mechanisms,” Malcolm Turnbull, newly appointed President of the International Hydropower Association said in an open letter to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. “To me it is a no-brainer,” Turnbull continued, “and I urge you to follow suit,” he said, adding that the British hydropower industry stands ready to meet with the UK government to help resolve the matter.
Reflecting on his own time of serving as Prime
Minister of Australia, Turnbull explained that: “It became clear that we were rolling out large amounts of variable renewable energy without paying enough attention to the need to back up the electricity supply when the sun was not shining or the wind was not blowing. This was especially true in the state of South Australia where an enormous amount of wind power was commissioned and conventional coal-fired generation was being closed, and it was this mismatch which contributed to a state-wide blackout in August 2016. Under my leadership, the federal government’s response was to launch the Snowy 2.0 PSH plant which will provide an additional 2000MW of generating capacity and 350,000MWh of large-scale storage. Not long after,
we announced the Battery of the Nation in Tasmania and recently the 2000MW Borumba PSH and 5000GW Pioneer-Burdekin PSH plants. I’m even building my own in New South Wales,” he added. “My lesson is that governments must plan ahead,”
Turnbull continued. “This over-reliance on variable renewables – wind and solar – is what I call the ignored crisis within the crisis. It is absolutely critical that we start building the storage capabilities to make renewables reliable - as we say ‘water, wind and sun, gets the job done’. But the markets do not naturally support reliability of electricity – just its generation. And the upfront costs of a hydropower plant, like PSH, are high. So, if we don’t get the frameworks right to enable a rapid deployment of pumped storage, there is a real risk that decarbonisation will stall, just as it needs to accelerate.”
Resource adequacy The question is, the British Hydropower Association’s
CEO Kate Gilmartin recently asked, what do we do when the wind isn’t blowing nor the sun shining and as we move away from gas peaking plant that currently fills those gaps? “This is the ‘resource adequacy’ issue and it is a
big unresolved problem for the UK in its ambition to decarbonise the grid by 2035 and become energy secure,” she said. With energy security being propelled up the policy agenda due to the sharp increase in energy prices caused by a post Covid surge in worldwide gas demand and the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, alongside the urgency of the ever more alarming
Right: Pontsticill Reservoir pictured during drought conditions in Wales
12 | September 2023 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53
