Britain Paying £180,000 an Hour to Switch Off Wind Farms
Britain is paying almost £180,000 an hour to switch off wind farms because there is nowhere for the excess power to go. The Telegraph has more.
So-called constraint payments, where turbines are switched off to help balance the grid, have already cost £252 million in the first two months of 2025.
This is up from £158 million over the same period last year, market data shows – an increase of 60%. The payments amount to £4.3 million per day, or about £178,000 an hour, money which ultimately comes from energy bills.
The revelation adds to concerns about the state of the UK’s creaking power grid as Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, pushes forward with an unprecedented expansion of wind and solar farms across the country.
Sam Richards, a former top Government adviser who now runs campaign group Britain Remade, said: “Switching cheap wind power off when it’s windy is costing bill payers, and the waste is spinning out of control – we reached the quarter of a billion mark twice as fast compared to last year.
“The Government needs to fix this urgently. Instead of wasting wind we should be letting cheap power cut energy costs directly to make it easier to build new factories or data centres. Paying for waste is just wrong.”
Grid operators are forced to resort to constraint payments because of bottlenecks in the network of cables that move electricity between the north and south of Britain.
If a wind farm has an agreement to generate power but cannot do so because it would overload the grid, it is handed a constraint payment instead to reduce its output.
At the same time, another generator – often a gas plant – is asked to cover any shortfall elsewhere, in the part of the network where the power is needed. Because of the short notice, this is often far more expensive.
For example, on Friday afternoon £79,507 was spent on switching off wind turbines while £1.2 million was spent buying energy elsewhere, according to the Wasted Wind website, which analyses Elexon market data.
Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm, Seagreen, was handed £65 million alone to slash its output last year.
Critics including Britain Remade and Octopus Energy, the country’s biggest supplier of household electricity and gas, have argued that the “staggeringly inefficient” setup is a result of the existing electricity pricing system, where wholesale power costs are the same in every part of the country.
This keeps power artificially cheap in areas such as the South East while skewing it higher in the North and Scotland.
Worth reading in full.
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Staggering, incredible waste of money! I look forward to the day when King Charles sends a flotilla of riverboats to take Milliband, Starmer, Lammy, Rachel from Accounts, and a whole host of others to the Tower via The Traitors Gate, and declares a full Royal Pardon for Tommy Robinson and all the British Patriots charged and imprisoned for protesting against the Murder of British Children. What a fine day that will be!
Unfortunately, he probably supports them!
Sounds like a money loser.
An absolute scam
Up to the start of the 18th century, life was slow-paced. Predominantly agrarian societies accepted that the miller could only grind the grain when the wind blew or the millstream flowed.
Industrialisation changed all that, with an ever-increasing array of manufacturing processes demanding high-density, high-gradient 24/7/365 energy. Enter King Coal, followed in the 20th century by Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Nuclear. Domestic mains electricity upped the ante on continuity of energy provenance and provision.
All explained here…
https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-net-zero
“…You can’t boil an egg in a swimming pool. Or run Britain on breezes.”
Inability of Prime Ministers, Ministers of Energy Insecurity, and parliamentary lemmings who waved through the 2008 Climate Claptrap Act, to understand the basic salient difference between intermittency and continuity of energy supply, is why the nonsense described in the article stalks the land and Britain suffers the highest electricity prices in the world.
Pandering to climate claptrap has a lot to answer for.
Put simply, the more wind energy there is on the grid then the more taxpayers will have to subsidise vital gas generation as they operate less. And in addition it make the grid less reliable as inertial generation is lower and a sudden wind drop could take the grid down. Chile has just experienced a grid failure where people ran out of cash, shops were closed and fuel was not available. Luckily their grid is a majority hydro with a lot of inertia and they could quickly restart it. I doubt we would be so lucky.
Most people will be unaware that electricity must be used as it is created. It is a case of “use it or lose it”. —–So ok but why not just switch the turbines off if there is too much wind? The answer is that no one would ever build the turbines if they were not guaranteed a price, and our stupid governments do exactly that. They have agreed to pay the owners of wind farms the same money even f there is no wind. This is like having to pay for a taxi or an aeroplane when you aren’t even in it. No wonder wind is actually the dumbest form of energy production. ——All this talk of saving the planet, or energy security, or thousands of jobs is a jumble of crap,.and simply the political excuses to fob the public off with the United Nations Agena 2030 eco communism. —-There is no climate crisis. It is a pseudo scientific fraud, and the disturbing thing is that our own squirming politicians are in on the scam. ——Americans should thank their lucky stars Trump doesn’t fall for this fraud. Soon UK and European electricity prices will be 5 times higher than in… Read more »
The spokesman quoted keeps saying ‘cheap’ wind power, which as we know is nothing of the sort when intermittency is taken into account. Forget having to curtail, worry about when the wind ain’t blowing and gas is having to do all the heavy lifting
There is a vital question which the public needs answered. That is why did you not charge the wind operators the actual cost of sufficient grid capacity when they got the wind farm connected to the Grid? In the case of the Scotland offshore turbines this would have been at least £1 Trillion to rebuild a line to the consumers in the South. I suspect they paid nothing, as “we must have more wind power” was more important! Scotland on a windy day can generate at least 20GW, but basically most of this is useless to anyone! Who is the fool in charge, answer either Rishi or Starmer? Simple answer, make the supplier pay as they should for a proper connection!