The Storage Illusion

Chapter 5:

The Storage Illusion – Batteries, Hydrogen, and Net Zero Fantasy

The UK’s push toward a fully decarbonised electricity grid has led policymakers to place disproportionate faith in energy storage technologies as the solution to renewable intermittency. From lithium-ion battery megafarms to green hydrogen production schemes, storage has become the catch-all answer to a grid increasingly dependent on weather. But this faith is dangerously misplaced. Storage is not a silver bullet; it is a costly, limited, and often misleading placeholder for the firm generation and infrastructure we have chosen to phase out.This chapter will examine the fundamental limitations of the UK’s current energy storage strategy and the inflated claims surrounding batteries and hydrogen. It will explore the real-world physics and economics behind these technologies, review major case studies of failure and underperformance, and reveal how storage has become a rhetorical device used to paper over the unsolved problems of Net Zero. In doing so, it will make the case that storage,far from being the cornerstone of Britain’s green energy future,is a fantasy sold to distract from the collapse of reliable baseload power.

Chapter 5,

Section 5.1: Batteries – Limited Duration, Unlimited Hype

Batteries have become the cornerstone of Britain’s renewable transition rhetoric, positioned as the key to solving the intermittency of wind and solar power. Policymakers, developers, and Net Zero advocates have promoted lithium-ion battery storage as a vital enabler of a flexible, clean grid. But this confidence rests on a distorted understanding of what batteries can actually deliver at a system scale. In truth, battery energy storage systems (BESS) offer limited-duration support, carry hidden risks, and are increasingly driven by arbitrage profits, not engineering necessity.

Most UK BESS projects approved to date offer between one and four hours of storage capacity. While these short bursts are helpful in stabilising local grid frequency or responding to fast shifts in supply and demand, they are categorically incapable of replacing firm generation during prolonged periods of low renewable output. To meet even a single day’s electricity demand in Great Britain ,which can exceed 800 GWh ,would require over 200 times the total installed battery storage currently operational in 2025.[1]

No national investment plan exists to close this gap, and the costs would be astronomical. Grid-scale lithium batteries remain best suited for momentary balancing ,not seasonal, regional, or deep backup roles.Yet the hype continues to escalate. Major industry players tout battery hubs as climate-friendly miracles, and press coverage routinely describes BESS developments as ‘green infrastructure’ without acknowledging their limitations. One reason for this narrative persistence is financial: BESS projects profit handsomely from market volatility. These systems can charge with cheap surplus solar or wind (especially during curtailment events), and sell power back when prices spike ,a process known as price arbitrage. In recent years, these spreads have widened dramatically due to the UK’s unstable generation mix and delayed grid reinforcements.[2]

Far from stabilising the grid, batteries are often making money from its dysfunction.There are also hidden risks associated with lithium-ion storage. Fire incidents, though rare, can be catastrophic. The explosion of the Victorian Big Battery in Australia (2021), a Tesla Megapack facility, sent toxic smoke into the air for three days and required specialised containment.[3]

In the UK, growing concerns have prompted regulators to review fire safety, toxic fume mitigation, and emergency access standards for BESS units located near residential areas. As more batteries are approved near substations or industrial parks, the cumulative hazard increases.Performance degradation is another often-overlooked issue. Lithium batteries lose capacity with every charge-discharge cycle. After 10–15 years, most utility-scale batteries require replacement. But project economics are often front-loaded ,developers earn maximum returns in early years via capacity markets, balancing services, and arbitrage trading, with long-term risk passed to consumers or asset managers. This misalignment incentivises scale and speed, not sustainability or longevity. It is further compounded by the UK’s lack of recycling infrastructure for lithium batteries, leading to end-of-life uncertainty and environmental impact.Perhaps the most overlooked flaw in the UK’s battery strategy is its dependence on foreign supply chains. Nearly all large-scale lithium batteries are imported ,primarily from China and South Korea , with materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel sourced from geopolitically unstable or environmentally damaging regions.[4]

This undermines claims of energy sovereignty and exposes Britain to external shocks. While some domestic firms are exploring sodium-ion alternatives and flow batteries, they remain far from commercial scale.

In summary, battery hype has outpaced battery reality. The technology has value, particularly in rapid frequency response, substation-level flexibility, and peak shaving. But it cannot substitute for baseload generation, cannot stabilise the grid for extended weather lulls, and cannot be scaled at reasonable cost to cover national demand. The UK’s energy strategy must acknowledge these limits ,not bury them in marketing gloss and optimistic spreadsheets. Batteries are not the future of power. They are a short-term patch on a system that has been made unstable by ideology and poor planning.

Footnotes[1] National Grid ESO. ‘2023 Future Energy Scenarios.’

[2] LCP Delta. ‘Battery Revenues Driven by Price Spreads, 2023 Performance Review.’

[3] Clean Energy Council Australia. ‘Victorian Big Battery Fire Review Report.’ 2022.

[4] IEA. ‘Global Supply Chains of EV Batteries.’ July 2022.

Chapter 5,

Section 5.2: Hydrogen – The False Messiah of Decarbonisation.

Hydrogen has emerged as a political and industrial darling in the UK’s Net Zero agenda, hailed as the long-duration storage solution capable of powering everything from homes to heavy industry. It has been championed as a clean fuel, a means of storing excess renewable electricity, and a pathway to decarbonise sectors beyond the reach of direct electrification. But behind the glossy brochures and strategic roadmaps lies a reality far less compelling: hydrogen is inefficient, expensive, and in many cases, unnecessary.The UK government’s Hydrogen Strategy, updated in 2023, commits to producing up to 10 GW of low-carbon hydrogen capacity by 2030, at least half of it via electrolysis using renewable power — so-called ‘green hydrogen.'[1]

Yet electrolysis is an energy-intensive process with a typical efficiency of 65–70%, meaning a third of input electricity is lost immediately. Reconverting hydrogen back into electricity via turbines or fuel cells adds further losses, bringing round-trip efficiency down to just 20–30%.[2] For comparison, lithium-ion batteries offer up to 90% round-trip efficiency. Hydrogen is thus a deeply inefficient way to store electricity — a luxury, not a baseline technology.Despite this, hydrogen is being proposed as a cornerstone of the UK’s decarbonised power grid, with demonstration projects targeting heat, power, and transport applications. One flagship effort, the proposed hydrogen village trial in Whitby (North Yorkshire), was cancelled in 2023 after fierce public opposition and safety concerns. Critics questioned whether forcing residents to switch from natural gas to hydrogen for heating was viable, given hydrogen’s explosive nature, lower energy density, and potential for increased NOx emissions.[3]

The project’s cancellation reflected broader unease with hydrogen hype outpacing public confidence and practical readiness.Hydrogen infrastructure is also far from mature. Storing and transporting hydrogen requires specialised pipelines, compressors, and storage vessels that can withstand embrittlement and leakage. Hydrogen is the smallest and most diffusive of all molecules, making containment difficult and leakage likely. According to a 2021 study in the journal Nature Communications, large-scale hydrogen deployment could lead to atmospheric increases in ozone and methane — ironic for a gas billed as ‘clean.'[4]

These risks have yet to be fully quantified or mitigated, yet deployment plans accelerate.The economic case for hydrogen is similarly shaky. Even optimistic projections suggest green hydrogen will cost 2–5 times more per megawatt-hour than conventional gas-fired generation.[5] Without state subsidies or contracts for difference (CfDs), most hydrogen ventures would collapse. The UK government’s Hydrogen Production Business Model (HPBM) guarantees developers a minimum price for hydrogen output — a policy effectively insulating them from market reality. This subsidy structure mirrors the mistakes of early wind and solar rollouts: high costs masked by long-term public burden.In energy terms, hydrogen represents a net drain rather than a solution. Its inefficiencies make it unsuitable for grid balancing, while its infrastructure demands and safety risks complicate scaling. The sectors where hydrogen may prove genuinely useful  fertiliser production, high-temperature steelmaking, and perhaps long-haul aviation ,represent niche industrial corners, not the mainstream power grid. Yet policymakers continue to portray hydrogen as a one-size-fits-all miracle, embedding unrealistic assumptions into strategic forecasts.International experience reinforces this scepticism.

Germany’s ‘Hydrogen Republic’ strategy has encountered mounting delays, while Japan’s costly hydrogen fuel cell vehicle push has been largely abandoned in favour of electric vehicles.

In the UK, no commercial-scale green hydrogen plant is yet operational  and even the flagship HyNet and East Coast Cluster projects remain in early planning.

The track record is thin, and the promises remain speculative.

Ultimately, hydrogen is being elevated less for what it can do and more for what it symbolises: a techno-futurist placeholder that allows political leaders to claim decarbonisation progress without resolving core grid weaknesses. It is the illusion of innovation over the substance of reform. For the UK to build a serious energy strategy, it must strip hydrogen of its mythical status and treat it for what it is ,a specialist tool, not a systemic saviour.

Footnotes

[1] DESNZ. ‘UK Hydrogen Strategy – Update 2023.’

[2] IEA. ‘Global Hydrogen Review 2022.’

[3] BBC News. ‘Hydrogen village trial scrapped after public backlash,’ July 2023.

[4] Nature Communications. ‘Atmospheric Impacts of Hydrogen Emissions,’ Vol 12, Article 5064 (2021).

[5] BloombergNEF. ‘Hydrogen Economy Outlook.’ 2022.

Chapter 5, Section 5.3:

The Grid Storage Mirage ,System-Level Risks of Battery-Hydrogen Dependence

As the UK pursues its Net Zero ambitions, the notion that battery and hydrogen storage can provide full grid stability has taken hold in policymaking circles. This belief forms the backbone of most long-term energy strategies, including National Grid ESO’s Future Energy Scenarios and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) roadmaps.

But at the system level, the assumptions underpinning this vision are dangerously optimistic , bordering on magical thinking. Storage does not behave like generation, and large-scale dependence on it creates structural risks that are only beginning to surface.

First, there is the issue of synchronisation and grid stability. Batteries and hydrogen fuel cells do not inherently provide system inertia , the natural resistance of a spinning mass (like a turbine or generator) to changes in frequency. Traditional power plants offer this inertia as a by-product of their physical mechanics, helping to buffer the grid against rapid imbalances. In contrast, inverter-based technologies (like batteries or hydrogen fuel cells) require synthetic inertia,computer-coded algorithms mimicking the response of rotating machines. This digital approximation is inherently reactive, not stabilising, and lacks the robustness of true inertia.

The National Grid has responded by establishing ‘inertia markets’ and paying fossil and nuclear generators to remain connected solely for the purpose of providing stability , a hidden subsidy to patch over the weaknesses of inverter-led grids. This means that even as renewable and storage assets increase in number, legacy generators must be kept online to maintain a stable AC waveform. Far from displacing the past, Net Zero policies are paradoxically tethering the UK to it.

Curtailment presents a second system-level risk. When the grid becomes saturated with variable renewables and lacks storage or transmission capacity to absorb them, excess electricity must be dumped or curtailed. Storage is often cited as the solution  a way to capture and re-use this surplus. But as real-world data shows, most battery installations can only absorb a fraction of the excess. In high wind periods, the UK sometimes curtails over 100 GWh in a week, more than all batteries in Britain could currently store.[1]

Hydrogen, with its inefficiencies and infrastructure delays, offers little relief.

Moreover, the effectiveness of storage depends not just on capacity, but on location and timing. A battery in South Wales cannot help resolve a surplus in North Scotland without upgraded interconnectors, and vice versa. Hydrogen pipelines do not yet exist at scale, and electrolyser deployment is still nascent. As a result, much of the proposed storage solution is spatially and temporally misaligned with actual demand and grid need.

This creates a mirage:

installed capacity increases, but system resilience does not.Perhaps most concerning is the risk of cascading failure. In an inverter-dominant grid, a disturbance at one node can propagate rapidly due to the lack of physical inertia. This phenomenon has already occurred in Australia, where a 2016 blackout in South Australia spread due to wind farm inverters disconnecting too quickly from the network.

In 2025, Iberian Peninsula grid regulators confirmed that hydrogen and battery-based stabilisers failed to prevent a cascading loss of power affecting Spain and Portugal — with some regions offline for nearly a week.[2] Such events may become more common as traditional power stations retire and digital systems dominate.

Cybersecurity is another overlooked vulnerability. Inverter-based infrastructure depends heavily on software, telemetry, and real-time data exchange. Batteries, hydrogen plants, and virtual power plants can all be remotely manipulated ,or attacked.

The 2023 Colonial Pipeline cyberattack in the US, though not targeting energy storage, revealed how easily critical infrastructure can be paralysed. The UK’s increasing digitalisation of power assets demands corresponding investment in cyber resilience, which has lagged behind physical rollout.

Finally, there’s the cost. Batteries and hydrogen systems are expensive to install, maintain, replace, and secure. They have short operational lifespans, uncertain recycling pathways, and rely on complex, globalised supply chains. Scaling them to the point where they could meaningfully replace gas or nuclear baseload is not only improbable ,it may be fiscally reckless.

Yet these costs are rarely highlighted in strategic planning documents, which assume steep learning curves and future breakthroughs.

The mirage of grid-wide storage  whether chemical or electrochemical , is blinding policymakers to the reality that a stable, resilient electricity system requires real-time, dispatchable generation.

Storage can help manage peaks and support flexibility, but it cannot shoulder the burden of national baseload or guarantee resilience in extreme conditions. By failing to confront this, Britain risks building an energy system as fragile as it is green ,a network of smart boxes and algorithms that collapses under real-world stress.

Footnotes

[1] National Grid ESO. ‘Monthly Curtailment Reports’, 2023–2025.

[2] European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). ‘Operational Report on Iberian Peninsula Grid Event,’ May 2025.

Chapter 5, Section 5.4: Conclusion

Resilience Requires Rethinking Storage

The promise of energy storage , batteries and hydrogen alike ,has become a central pillar in Britain’s Net Zero ambitions. Promoted as the key to unlocking a flexible, decarbonised grid, these technologies are sold as solutions to intermittency, curtailment, and system stability.

Yet as we have explored, their capabilities have been wildly overstated. Storage can complement generation, but it cannot replace it. It can smooth some edges of volatility, but it cannot anchor a system built on unpredictability.

In practice, batteries offer short bursts of support but cannot deliver sustained supply during prolonged renewable lulls. Their economics favour profit-seeking arbitrage rather than grid resilience. Their operational risks ,fire hazards, degradation, and end-of-life disposal ,are still poorly managed, and their materials are sourced from geopolitically sensitive supply chains.

They are tools, not solutions.

Hydrogen, meanwhile, has been elevated to messianic status in political discourse. Yet its inefficiencies, infrastructure hurdles, safety concerns, and high cost make it an unsuitable foundation for system-wide energy planning. Hydrogen may play a role in niche industrial processes, but the dream of a hydrogen-powered grid is as financially risky as it is physically implausible.

Britain has already witnessed public rejection of hydrogen heating trials, and its electrolyser capacity lags far behind target trajectories.

The deeper issue is strategic substitution , the idea that unproven or unsuitable technologies can stand in for dispatchable baseload power. This is not simply misguided; it is a form of policy escapism.

Britain’s energy planners are avoiding hard decisions ,like investing in new gas or nuclear generation  by projecting confidence onto storage models that cannot deliver.

This is evident in scenarios from the Climate Change Committee, NGESO, and DESNZ that assume heroic levels of storage buildout with little regard for cost, reliability, or feasibility.

A system based on batteries and hydrogen cannot provide physical inertia, cannot absorb multi-day demand surges, and cannot safeguard against blackout cascades or cyber threats.

The operational failures in Australia (2016), California (2020), and Iberia (2025) are not abstract warnings — they are previews. They demonstrate what happens when real-world stress tests collide with virtual solutions. Britain is not immune. Without corrective action, it is heading toward the same grid fragility.What’s needed instead is a balanced portfolio ,one that respects the physical constraints of electricity delivery and the irreplaceable value of dispatchable, synchronous generation.

Gas-fired power, nuclear plants, and perhaps advanced small modular reactors (SMRs) can provide firm capacity.

Rooftop solar, combined with localised battery storage, can enhance resilience at the edge. But neither batteries nor hydrogen can shoulder the grid alone — and to pretend otherwise is to gamble with national energy security.

Finally, transparency must return to energy policy.

The public deserves to understand the costs, trade-offs, and risks of Britain’s chosen path. Net Zero cannot become a blank cheque for unaccountable experimentation.

Resilience requires realism – and realism requires abandoning the myth that storage will save us. Until then, Britain remains trapped in a dangerous illusion:

mistaking backup systems for a backbone, and betting the future on technologies that can’t bear the weight.

Footnotes

[1] National Grid ESO. ‘Future Energy Scenarios 2023–2024.’

[2] Climate Change Committee. ‘Sixth Carbon Budget – Sector Pathways.’

[3] Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. ‘Hydrogen Strategy Update to the Market.’ 2023.

[4] BBC News. ‘Whitby Hydrogen Trial Cancelled After Backlash,’ 2023.

[5] European Network of Transmission System Operators. ‘Operational Stability Reports,’ 2020–2025.