If you think of the UK’s renewable energy market as a jigsaw puzzle, electricity storage is the missing piece. While December 2023 saw a 6.8% increase in renewable energy generation (30.1 TWh in Q3), thanks to higher wind speeds and increased onshore and offshore capacity, the reality is that unless we find a way to store that energy, our renewable supply will remain as unpredictable as the weather. And that means a continued reliance on fossil fuels, regardless of how much money is thrown at hydrogen production, wind farms and solar panels.

For Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, a former director-general of CERN (the Large Hadron Collider accelerator was approved during his tenure), Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Royal Society fellow, this has become something of a mission. In September 2023, he co-authored a Royal Society report on large-scale electricity storage that highlighted the need to support large-scale wind and solar power generation with large-scale hydrogen storage, and to start building that storage now.