End battery rip-off and take control to lower bills, says Prospect

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It set out a raft of measures on how PM Andy Burnham should put his vow for greater public control of the utilities into practice.

It said that the government should take direct responsibility for building grid-scale battery storage, rather than leaving this to the private sector.

“Under the current model private investors fund battery storage, but this means they are able to repeatedly extract money from the state, including by ‘repetitive retrading’,” a spokesman for the energy worker union said.

“This is where battery operators use excess energy to charge the batteries, and then immediately attempt to resell the energy to the grid despite knowing there is already too much energy in the system.

“They are then paid by the government not to sell their energy.”

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