Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 15 January 2014
465. Deputy Michael Colreavy asked the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources the current storage capacity within the electricity grid; and the targets that have been set to increase same in order to take full advantage of electricity generated from renewable sources. [1337/14]
View answerThere is no storage capacity within the electricity grid. Electricity cannot effectively be stored in the form of electricity; it has to be transformed into another form of energy, such as chemical or potential energy, before it can be stored.
There is energy storage external to the grid that can be utilised to generate electricity at times when the grid is under stress; in particular in Ireland we have the Turlough Hill pumped storage facility in County Wicklow, which has a capacity of 292 MW. With the upper reservoir full, there is an energy storage of 1,590 megawatt-hours which equates to more than 5 hours running of the station at full output. I also understand that one other pumped storage facility in the Munster area, with a capacity of 70 megawatts has a grid connection offer.
There are no national targets for storage, whether associated with renewable sources of electricity or not, in Ireland, or, indeed, in any other country. There are many ways for electricity grid operators to facilitate increased penetration of renewables including, inter alia, distributed storage technologies, increased interconnection, strengthening the grid, and “smart grid” technology.
Integrating distributed energy storage with the electricity grid is at an early stage of development and in this regard my Department is funding additional research into investigating the potential for energy storage to facilitate more renewable-generated electricity. The scope of work covers various kinds of energy storage, including batteries, further pumped hydro and large-scale compressed air storage. This work is again being carried out on an all-island basis, with funding also coming from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (Northern Ireland) and the European Union’s INTERREG Programme. I look forward to the results of this work in about 18 months’ time.
