(REPOST: Clean Energy)
The government’s new industrial strategy has made local smart energy systems one of its priority areas of development.
Published this morning, the industrial strategy places clean growth among four ‘Grand Challenges’ that it aims to solve. It describes decarbonisation as one of the “greatest industrial opportunities of our time”, and discusses the government’s intention to place the UK at the forefront of it.
While specific energy-related commitments are scant – the government has already published its Clean Growth Strategy which outlined these policies in detail – the strategy does discuss the need to remodel the national electricity grid to enable the various different kinds of renewable generation that are coming on-stream.
The government also intends to embrace new technologies that enable far greater storage of electricity and the management of demand.
This stems from the 2,000 responses the government received to its original green paper, published earlier this year, which suggested that it takes a whole systems approach to the energy market. The government has agreed with this approach and narrowed in on the establishment of local, smart energy grids to take this approach further.
Developments in this area are also expected to feed into the wider decarbonisation of heat and transport.
“Smart systems can link energy supply, storage and use, and join up power, heating and transport to increase efficiency dramatically. By developing these world-leading systems in the UK, we can cut bills while creating high value jobs for the future,” the strategy states.