THE UK is generating but not using enough electricity to power 2.6 million homes per year – but Scotland will be home to a “global flagship” project which can put that waste to good use, the chief executive of an energy firm has said.
Richard Butland, who leads the London-based company Highview Power, spoke to The National about plans to develop a liquid air energy storage (LAES) plant at Hunterston in Ayrshire – and the problems it could help solve.
As it stands, UK energy bill payers see costs of wind farm “curtailment” added on to the prices they pay for their electricity. These costs are paid to wind farm operators to shut down when they are generating more power than the grid can handle.
In 2024, £1 billion was added to energy bills due to curtailment, according to analysis from Octopus Energy.
Storing that energy so it can be used at a later time rather than wasted is an essential part of the development of the UK’s grid. LAES (pronouced like “lays”) is one way of doing that and saving the consumer money, Highview Power believes.
“If you look at the curtailment last year, it was close to seven terawatt hours [TWh], which is about just over 2.5% of our entire energy consumption as a nation for the year,” Butland said. “It's a huge number in absolute terms.”
Ofgem estimates that the typical Scottish household uses 2700 kilowatt hours (KWh) per year.
There are one billion KWh in a TWh – meaning the wasted 7TWh represents enough electricity for some 2.6 million households for an entire year – more than the 2.54 million the National Records of Scotland estimates exist north of the Border.
Butland went on: “That seven [TWh] could be 40 or 50 by 2030 if we build out all the renewables, and it could be even higher if we don't put the storage in now.
“Fifty terawatt hours would be £3 billion of energy that we should be using.”
The Highview Power said the current 7TWh figure represents “about half a billion pounds of energy which we've created which we're not using”.
“The way I look at it is we have half a billion pounds of opportunity now to capture that energy and make it available and then lower cost to consumers,” he said.
“We've already put all the capital, the investment in to generate it. It's being generated and not used.
“That's going to grow by five to eight times by 2030 as we add more renewable generation without storage. We can't afford for that to happen.”
“One of our board members talks about how we then have frozen energy, like we're the Bird's Eye of energy,” Butland explained.
“When we need power, we add a bit of heat which we retain from the process. We have a giant molten salt bed at 450°C.
“So we add a bit of heat, the liquid air expands 700 fold, it turns turbines. So, all we're doing is putting the air back in the atmosphere.”
Butland said that Highview Power has plans to develop sites across the UK and the world – linking with large-scale wind power projects to provide storage at source.
Their first site at Carrington, near Manchester, is expected to be completed by 2026 and create 700 jobs.
The firm’s second, at Hunterston, will be “a different generation”, Butland said.
“It's eight times bigger, massively more efficient, massively more flexible, and much lower cost.
“It'll be the flagship globally.”
The Hunterston plant will have a capacity of 2.5 gigawatt hours – equivalent to 2.5 million KWh.
Butland argued that by developing more storage capacity, the UK energy system can become more resilient, independent, and avoid the price shocks caused by events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“By 2030 we should be, broadly speaking, an over 90% clean energy system,” he said. “It’s amazing.
“The other incredible thing about that is we will have much less volatility – because if we are over 90% clean energy, we're actually 90% secure and 90% predictable.”
He said that LAES systems could replace gas plants which “cost us hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds to run just for voltage support at key locations”.
He added: “Our integrated plan replaces what the gas plant does at a much lower cost – because we're not burning gas and we don't have the carbon.”
