UK Electricity Grid Rescued by Gas as Massive Winter Wind Droughts Disrupt Supply

Sunning himself in some Spanish spring sunshine, the British Prime Minister is no doubt relieved that the Supreme Court back home has given him some much needed guidance on the biology of a woman. But we must hope his holiday good humour is being disturbed by news that the breezes that will power his new socialist economic miracle went on strike during significant parts of the first quarter. In a colder-than-usual winter, windmill output fell by 11%, pushing up demand for gas and imports and causing a number of unstable and highly expensive price spikes. What dick is in charge at the Department of Energy, he might be asking himself.

Step forward Ed Miliband, whose entire political career now seems to rest on his ability to keep a straight face while stating that the unreliable breezes and sunbeams are cheaper than regular-as-clockwork gas. According to Montel Analytics, low levels of renewable generation and high demand drove gas-fired power production to its highest level since 2021 for the first three months of 2025. But this gas rescue act came at a large cost since Britain’s increasingly unstable electricity supply, which provides some of the highest prices in the world, showed wild cost swings in windless days in January. On at least two freezing winter days, wind production was more-or-less zero. Not untypical winter weather conditions also saw the sun fail to shine for a number of consecutive days. Some periods saw the wholesale peak-time electricity price top £160 per megawatt hour ((MWh). On January 8th, when winter high pressure stopped the wind blowing across the UK, the wholesale price soared to £300 MWh, while the sophisticated clearing price needed to balance the non-storable supply with instant demand soared to £2,900 MWh.

Gas-generated electricity rose to 26.8 TWh during the first quarter, a rise of 13% from Q4 2024 and the highest Q1 level for four years. This despite considerable new wind capacity coming online. Wind generation fell to its lowest first quarter output since 2020. Britain sits on huge reserves of onshore gas and offshore hydrocarbons but over the winter the Mad One ordered two remaining gas fracking wells near Blackpool to be destroyed. Despite an official admission that gas will be needed for renewable electricity back-up into the foreseeable future, new oil and gas exploration has been stopped. And continuing with the de-industrialising, job-destroying, national security harming themes, a new coking mine in Cumbria was recently knocked on the head and this may have contributed to the economic woes of steel-making at Britain’s last blast furnaces in Scunthorpe.

A modern electricity system fit to power an advanced industrial society is highly complex and must take account of large swings in demand throughout a 24-hour period. Power has to be instantly supplied whatever the time of day, weather conditions and the industrial or social activities a population of nearly 70 million people choose to undertake. Last winter saw long periods of wind drought causing chaos to this delicate operation and the UK was lucky to avoid serious blackouts. The German word for such a drought is dunkelflaute which might roughly be translated as ‘no frigging wind’. It might also be noted that the eco-zealots led by the Mad Miliband who are destroying a once reliable cheap electricity system and causing mass de-industrialisation have no frigging idea what they are doing.

The big lie of course is that renewable power is cheaper than gas. Many commentators including David Turver in the Daily Sceptic have shown this is deluded poppycock. The lie travels around the TV and radio studios because £15 billion of annual renewable subsidies are ignored. Without these subsidies, which add hundreds of pounds to the electricity bills of rich and poor alike, nobody would instal a windmill or solar farm. Add in the extra costs of grid balancing, backup and necessary expansion of the network and it is not difficult to see why some of the highest prices for electricity in the world are driving industry away from the UK. Turver notes that “if something needs a subsidy, it’s more expensive”. But few want to acknowledge the huge elephant in the room since Net Zero is not subject to rational mathematics and science. The obvious reason for this is that it is a political agenda. A fake climate crisis, accepted for 20 years by media outlets such as the BBC without a scintilla of convincing proof, is mobilised to achieve long sought after hard Left collectivist ambitions.

Another reliable commentator is Paul Homewood and he has been working on the true electricity figures for many years. “These subsidies have to be paid because renewables are intrinsically much dearer than gas power, not the reverse,” he observes. But the house of cards is undoubtedly starting to sway in the sceptical breezes. Journalist legend Andrew Neil recently posted on X his frustration with those interviewing Miliband by suggesting they “need to be better briefed so they can call him out when he spouts nonsense”. Miliband often claims the UK is in the grip of petro-state dictators, yet in the absence of job-creating fracking, Britain obtains most of it foreign gas from Norway and the USA. On the other hand, Miliband was noted to have recently travelled to China to plead for stakes in green UK infrastructure. Not so much a petro-state dictatorship, points out Neil, just a dictatorship.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.