Cost of Switching Off U.K. Wind Farms on Windy Days Hits “Absurd” £1 Billion
British energy bill payers have spent an “absurd” £1 billion to temporarily switch off wind turbines so far this year because the grid struggles to cope with their power on windy days. The Telegraph has more.
The amount of wind power “curtailed” in the first 11 months of 2024 stood at about 6.6 terawatt hours (TWh), according to official figures, up from 3.8 TWh in the whole of last year.
Curtailment is where wind turbines are paid to switch off at times of high winds to stop a surge in power overwhelming the grid. Households and businesses pay for the cost of this policy through their bills.
The cost of switching off has reached about £1 billion so far this year, according to analysis of market data by Octopus Energy which was first reported by Bloomberg. This is more than the £779 million spent last year and £945 million spent in 2022.
The jump in curtailment follows the opening of more wind farms at a time when the country still lacks the infrastructure needed to transport all the electricity they generate at busy times.
Clem Cowton, the Director of External Affairs at Octopus, added: “The outdated rules of our energy system mean vast amounts of cheap green power go to waste.
“It’s absurd that Britain pays Scottish wind farms to turn off when it’s windy, while simultaneously paying gas-power stations in the South to turn on.
“We need to change the rules that govern our system to make the most of our homegrown energy and get bills down for British households and businesses.” …
Jason Mann, an electricity markets expert at FTI Consulting, said the high curtailment costs underlined the lack of cables to transport power to the South.
However, he also argued the £1 billion cost was partly the result of Britain’s national electricity pricing system.
Mr. Mann said: “Congestion costs are an inevitable problem under the current market design we have in Britain.
“Increasing the amount of transmission capacity we have can alleviate the problem but not fully – it will remain an enduring issue.
“At some point you have to do something that encourages greater demand in the North, for example lower prices.”
According to the National Energy System Operator (Neso), curtailment costs are on course to surge to £6 billion by 2030 if the status quo continues.
And of course, we also pay extra to turn on the gas on windless days. Renewables are only good for Goldilocks, it seems.
Worth reading in full.
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I thought there were supposed to be lots of batteries by now to store the excess energy.
I wonder what happened to that idea, not.
It would be very difficult to build 6.6TWh of battery storage, and massively expensive too.
Not that the fools in charge would care.
“We need to change the rules that govern our system to make the most of our homegrown energy and get bills down for British households and businesses.”
A laudable sentiment however Kneel and the people running him have no interest in reducing bills for consumers and certainly not for businesses. If we are to become a medieval society once more and by 2030 the immiseration and controls must be ramped up. From the Davos Deviants point of view I suspect they consider everything is going to plan.
The misery will continue.
These reports from Clown World are getting more and more disturbing. I would hate to live in such world – a world where the people who claim to be in charge are apparently either incompetent or corrupt or both. Oh wait …
Dead right, and probably vindictive too…
vast amounts of cheap green power go to waste
There is no such thing.
Ask Octopus to pay for the Grid to be rebuilt, only £3 Trillion!
Wind farm fantasies are the cause. Wind turbines were and are a neat way to charge batteries on small boats and for remote, off grid homes. Not to run a country of 68 million. We are mentally ill. Trump needs to invade us and sort us out
Why aren’t the suppliers just paid for the electricity they produce? So when it’s not windy they don’t get paid, when it’s too windy they don’t get paid! How the investors would flee in droves, green energy is not powered by wind or sunshine, like ev’s, its powered by subsidies
Level the playing field and green energy will soon show its true colours (and its anything but green!)
Because we’d not have any ‘renewables’ then, as natural selection would have proven they are not viable without massive subsidies… and many influential people ‘feel’ renewables are the nice answer to save the planet – argh! God help us
And more wind farms are to be built.
I’ve been following a campaign to prevent logging and the destruction of the Clashindarroch forest in Scotland which is the home of at least one family of Scottish wildcats; they have cameras set up and regularly upload footage of a successful family with a litter of kittens from last year.
The case came before a senior judge a couple of weeks ago who ruled that the wind farm project must go ahead, the land sold to a Swedish firm who will fell the forest, develop the land and sod the wildcats. Even an appeal to KC3 got nowhere. (What can you expect from a Green plant-bothering dog person?)
Maybe if they were threatening newts rather than endangered wildcats there would have been a more favourable response.
“Clem Cowton, the Director of External Affairs at Octopus, added: “The outdated rules of our energy system mean vast amounts of cheap green power go to waste.” Cowton is admitting that NESO (Great Britain’s System Operator) is having issues balancing electricity supply and demand 24/7 due to the amount of renewables in the Grid. One way is to have grid energy storage such as battery storage, the other is the use of smart grid technologies whereby appliances would communicate with the utility using digital means, and can therefore be switched on and off by the utility to run at off-peak hours. From Wiki: In a very basic demand balancing system, the power company sends a signal down the line or by a dedicated phone chip to turn on a special circuit in the home. Typically, a storage device for space heating or a water heater will be connected to this circuit. The electricity is turned on after the evening peak demand, and turned off in the morning before the morning peak demand starts. The cost for such power is less than the “on-demand” power which makes it worthwhile for the user to subscribe to it. A nuanced system is possible… Read more »
Smart grid is nonsense. Unworkable, how well does your washing machine work if turned off half way through a wash? Or your heating on a cold day, or anything else useful? And your car charging on a motorway turned off for 12 hours when the wind stops? Good luck with that!
Spot on. It’s utter nonsense – yet the Millibands of this world fervently buy into it and spaff hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money on it.
And the main/first issue, as I understand it, is shifting vast amounts of electricity from north to south without overloading the super grid etc… there’s a reason why nuclear stations were built next to smelting works etc – keep the main users close. To my knowledge there are no high energy use factories in the North Sea!
The contracts for renewables are ridiculous! Negotiated by who? Presumably Civil Servants who would not know a “good deal” if they ran across one! The deal is terrible in all respects for the consumer and magic for the wind farm (and solar soon) owners. Crazy!
They are literally subsidy farmers – and who can blame them if our governments of all colours are so bloody stupid to create such a crazy, upside down ecosystem vs what we had up until the late eighties
PLEASE can someone work out and publicise how much Net Zero is costing us? I saw a figure of £1700 per family per annum some years ago. I make it around £2000, but it depends on assumptions. All the wind farm electricity subsidies and extra costs (eg the costs of the backup power stations not in full time use, and the payments to wind farm operators for NOT making electricity); the subsidies for electric cars; the extra costs of NOT exploiting our local oil and fracking gas; etc, etc.
I miss Booker who was warning (with Richard North) about the huge expense of the “CO2 is the primary driver of climate” nonsense over 20 years ago. 15 years ago he wrote in The Real Global Warming Disaster that: “it begins to look very possible that the nightmare vision of our planet being doomed”[1] may be imaginary, and that, if so, “it will turn out to be one of the most expensive, destructive, and foolish mistakes the human race has ever made”.
How prescient he was.
He is the reason I started to question everything re climate and ended up a complete sceptic
Yes. Booker and Richard North were very influential on my thinking – with Booker’s newspaper and Private Eye articles and Richard’s EU Referendum blog. EU, Self regulating government agencies, the foot and mouth crisis, climate change, energy policy, “fake media” etc etc – they were writing and warning us about so many subjects decades before the pennies started to drop for the majority of people.