Energy storage subsidies now: My Budget wish for the auto industry

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Energy storage subsidies now: My Budget wish for the auto industry

This year’s Budget poses a massive challenge for new chancellor Rishi Sunak. Brexit, coronavirus and the Yorkshire Tea row will no doubt be keeping him extremely busy – but I’m hoping he’ll be able to continue paving the way to getting more autonomous vehicles on the road this year.

While the Budget is set to include a few measures such as new company car tax reductions for electric vehicles from April and ending the freeze on fuel duty – at Sarginsons we are hoping for a major boost for the development of energy storage solutions.

Currently, we can produce lots of electricity from wind energy and other means, but not necessarily at the right time, so we – consumers, companies and factories – need urgent solutions for energy storage.

Despite government efforts to invest in energy storage over the past few years – specifically,  the Faraday Battery Challenge – the industry needs further funds for R&D locked into the 2020 Budget. In 2017, an article in the Conversation highlighted that the Faraday Challenge’s focus was chiefly on ‘ready-to-roll’ technologies, and specifically – in “established and publicly recognised lithium-ion batteries”. There was a lack of attention paid to alternative technologies for energy storage, such as pumped-hydro, compressed air and superconducting magnets, the authors argued

Furthermore, the authors argued, any of UK’s efforts were already dwarfed by gigafactories in China, the US and Australia. The only way to get ahead of the competition would be to break away from lithium-ion-based technology and invest in innovative energy storage solutions. I agree – and this would require a lot more investment than has been allocated in the years since.

I don’t propose to have all the answers – providing the essential infrastructure to bring EV and AV technology to every household in Britain is, of course, a multi-faceted issue involving training huge parts of the UK’s workforce – among other major measures. But on Wednesday – at the very least – I will be hoping to hear government plans to incentivise large energy users such as foundries, to install their own storage facilities. This would enable them to run on off-peak power all day but also be connected to the grid if there is a surge of power requirement or a fault in the network. Incentivising companies to store renewable energy will also allow car parts for electric cars to made with renewable energy which will quash some of the big counter-arguments, that car production requires masses of carbon.