Miliband’s Flagship Wind Farm Paid Nearly £2.5 Million to Keep Turbines Switched Off
Ed Miliband’s flagship Viking wind farm in the Shetlands has already bagged nearly £2.5 million to keep its turbines turned off, reveals the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt:
Mr. Miliband, the Energy Secretary, praised the Viking wind farm in the Shetlands, which officially opened on Thursday, saying “hundreds of thousands of homes” across the country would benefit from “cheap, home-grown energy”.
He said the development, the U.K.’s largest onshore wind farm, “shows why we need more developments like this to make Britain a clean energy superpower”.
SSE, which operates Viking, promised that it would be Britain’s “most productive” onshore wind farm. But figures from the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) show 62% of its output has had to be discarded in its first month.
The wind farm has so far been paid £2.48 million by the National Grid to reduce its energy output, according to the REF analysis.
The payouts, which will ultimately be added to consumer bills, have been made almost every day this month and have varied between £227,192 and £8,408 per day.
Known as constraint payments, they are paid out by the National Grid to incentivise wind farms to reduce output when more energy is generated than can be used locally or exported to consumers elsewhere in the U.K., usually as a result of higher wind speeds.
The value of constraint payments to wind farms has increased rapidly in recent years as more of Britain’s power has come from renewable sources. Last year, wind farms were paid over £310 million to stop producing energy, up from £174,000 in 2010, according to REF data.
The charity’s analysis found that £1.8 billion had been spent since constraint payments began in 2010, which had ultimately been passed on to consumers’ electricity bills.
Worth reading in full.
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Another piece of satire that came true
”His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”
How do we get into the nut supplying electricity business? It is very lucrative it seems. I could start by not supply 100MWh and then expand from that into GWh.
“Nut” supplying – Freudian slip?
Yeah, build some fake windmills and ker-ching ££££££
“…when more energy is generated than can be used…”
What that tells us is that gas + nuclear can supply demand without wind. In order for wind to sell, gas and nuke have to reduce their input to the grid (and gas has to stay on continuous standby in case wind output drops).
But in order to ensure base load is maintained, gas + nuclear have to maintain a certain level of output and wind cannot replace this for technical reasons, and so even though wind is generating more, it cannot supply it or the grid will overload.
Wind is not therefore increasing electricity supply, it is just a parasite on gas + nuke.
We are paying for parallel systems, one which could give continuous supply, the other which cannot. This will get worse as more wind turbines and solar are added. Costs will go up and up.
Wind and solar because of intermittency cannot compete in a free market for wholesale electricity. These companies are not viable as profitable enterprises without massive subsidy.
I have been on this case since about 2007. Using wind is like having to pay for two cars because one only works 3 days a week, but you never know when.
Brilliant analogy!
And gas and nuclear – and coal if we still had it – are cheaper than unreliable and intermittent wind and solar. Increasing the amount of either on the grid increases the risk of a grid failure should it become cloudy – it has happened in Alice Springs – or the wind drop suddenly, or given the remote connections, a supply cable failure. Balancing this costs many times more now which explains the ever rising standing charge.
It seems as if it should be possible to store this extra energy for slow periods later–in some kind of battery, perhaps. But what do I know?
I think these operators should be forced to closely couple storage, then they could guarantee output and duration for a period. Naturally they won’t do this as it’s crazy expensive and impractical, when the can just bank payments like these. I don’t understand why they are not classed as second tier / non reliable / non base load in all interactions with the grid?
There’s the financial cost, and the Energy cost to consider. How Energy efficient is each component, to work out how much Energy you get, in a timely manner, and the total cost of the enterprise.
That picture of Ed:
We’re going this way. Follow me!
Or alternatively:
If the electrical conductor moves this way through a magnetic field going this way the current should come out of the top of my head… Er.. Or is it into?
Wind Power. —–The dumbest, most expensive, land intensive, unreliable, ideologically motivated crap. In Germany the Red Kite has been virtually wiped out by this nonsense. I recently flew into Edinburgh Airport and looking down, the country looks like a giant pin cushion. make no mistake why the Milibands of the western world are doing this to us. They are UN and WEF puppets onboard with the Sustainable Devlopment Eco Communist world view that says we in the prosperous west have used up more than our fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground. So we are to STOP doing that and our own politicians like Miliband have no hesitation in lowering our living standard because prosperity is directly connected to price and availability of energy. Doing this gives them great standing with the Global Governance people. ——-We are being played, and Miliband has the audacity to talk of cheaper energy bills. The man is a bare faced liar.
It is as if there was no valid reason why we dumped windmills back in the 19th century.
This is staggering enough, then the real kicker comes at the end: that we’ve been paying these “constraint payments” since 2010 !!!???
This situation brings new meaning to the term “staggering stupidity”.
Milliband, who may or may not understand anything about energy and energy policy, is doing exactly what he was told to do, which is to impoverish our economy using green as an excuse. Shell and BP are announcing job cuts in Aberdeen as we speak. The Tories had no energy policy either, arguably we haven’t had one for decades in this country. But when [if] we come to our senses, there will still be decades worth of coal, oil and gas supplies lying there, right beneath our feet….