Speaking at the Low Carbon Networks & Innovation Conference in Liverpool, Whitehead said the Department for Energy and Climate Change has failed to appreciate the critical role smart girds will play in the UK’s energy future in the recent energy policy “reset” revealed earlier this month, and that it should be considered a “public good investment”.
He said energy policy should not treat smart grids as a competing technology that will either succeed or fail in the market.
Smart grids allow distribution network operators to proactively manage both demand and generation connected to the network.
Whitehead said: “My concern frankly is that we treat grid smarts from a policy perspective as just another technology that we should not unfairly advantage by picking winners and that we will put in the pot of competing technologies that we eventually expect the market to sort out.
“The fact that smart grids are and will be the glue that holds all those competing technologies together and makes the difference between a mediocre or fully efficient performance on their part, ought to point us towards how we should see smart grids in the future.”
Whitehead also called for investment in smart grids to be “positively planned” to ensure it can be facilitated and supported.
He also said he hoped the government’s new infrastructure commission will particularly look at smart grids as part of its investigations into the energy trilemma.