Scotland’s Biggest Offshore Wind Farm Wasting Three Quarters of Energy
Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm wasted three quarters of the energy it produced last year after being paid hundreds of millions of pounds to switch off its turbines. The Telegraph has the story.
The Seagreen wind farm off Scotland’s east coast is squandering vast amounts of its power because there is not enough grid capacity to transport it to areas of the country where it is needed most.
This inability to handle surplus electricity led to 77% of Seagreen’s total output going to waste last year, new accounts show, from a total of 114 turbines.
This is likely to have sparked hundreds of millions of pounds in so-called constraint payments for the wind farm, which is run by Scottish energy giant SSE and France’s TotalEnergies.
These payments are made under a Government scheme to encourage renewables, aimed at guaranteeing cash for green power even if it cannot be used.
SSE, which is the lead partner in the Seagreen wind farm, refused to disclose how much it was paid for switching off the turbines.
However, estimates from the Renewable Energy Foundation suggest it could amount to more than £200 million for the year.
Constraint payments relating to wasted wind are added to consumer and business energy bills in the form of network charges.
Overall, they totalled around £1.7 billion last year and are set to reach £8 billion by 2030.
Claire Coutinho, the Shadow Energy Secretary, blamed Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, for overseeing a system that is becoming unaffordable.
“What other sector do we pay people not to produce anything? We’re spending £1 billion switching wind farms off today, but thanks to Ed Miliband’s mad dash for renewables, we’ll be spending £8 billion by 2030,” she said.
“We simply cannot afford an approach that makes our energy system higher cost and less productive. Cheap, reliable energy must come first.”
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
It is a scandal that permits are given to build wind farms when it is KNOWN that the grid cannot handle their output.
It cannot be stupidity, it must be corruption.
It is a specific form of corruption – grift.
Persuading MPs to mandate your product or service (preferably an unnecessary one with no clear Definition of Done so it can continue indefinitely) so they can then buy it from you with taxpayers’ money in return for a nice Thank You Envelope under the table.
It is also necessary to ensure that the public believe in the existence of the problem which said product or service is supposed to solve.
Very simple.
An alternative is the companies involved could build huge battery farms local to the wind turbines, so they can store all their additional power they currently can’t ship… then they can release it as capacity allows. However, if you are being paid anyway to switch off – why would you bother doing all that?
the contracts these companies get are crazy.
Yes. Anyone wanting to connect any form of generation to the grid should be obliged to meet dispatchability requirements, which they must fund themseleves.
And not be subsidised.
And therefore won’t happen, as should have been the policy from the start!
Battery storage at grid level is not available at a cost that would make any sense. It would cost 20 times more to store the energy. As with all things GREEN, there always has to be massive subsidy coercion and bribes. No one would ever build a turbine without the subsidies, because they are totally uneconomical. Government interfere massively in the energy market. It isn’t a free market and is totaly distorted by government whim and for political purposes that pretend to be about the climate.
“Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm wasted three quarters of the energy it produced last year…”
Ahem. Will Jones go stand on the naughty step.
Wind (subsidy) farms do not produce energy, they COLLECT energy from the wind and convert it into electricity… quite inefficiently and occasionally. If they could produce energy they would need the wind to blow.
Since the wind is “free” as we are constantly told, and since electricity is only produced if the turbine is operating, and if wind installations are not able to join the grid, they are not turning and not producing “power” therefore the “free” energy they are not collecting cannot be being squandered or wasted as it is still there in the power of the wind going past the turbines.
Pedantic I know, but there is so much misleading nonsense (well, lies actually) in the Net Zero scam, the details are important.
Actually, what I have heard is that the electricity they have been paid for not ‘delivering’, they put into battery power banks and then can charge a second time for the electricity at other times. Great scam?
But when you are getting paid not to produce using the “Free Wind” is where the absurd economics occurs. When ideology trumps common sense you will pay 5 times more for something where you will get get the same result from something else. ——PS The wind, gas and coal are all free. It is harnessing them that isn’t free. It just so happens that wind is more expensive to harness than coal and gas, mainly because it is part time energy that requires 100% backup from a full time source, which means you are paying for two sources instead of one. —-It is a bit like having to own 2 cars because one only works some of the time and you never know when.
Giving money away like its confetti, because its not theirs, this is corruption, and irrespective of storage/non storage, when paid for nothing, its still paid for nothing, All net zero/green etc should be ceased immediately, the earth provided resources and it is those we should be utilising and yes you may argue wind is one, but the cost and lets not forget the cost to wildlife too far exceeds the benefits of wind power.
Another quote from the Telegraph article – A spokesman for SSE said: “A wind farm switched off represents potential waiting to be unlocked…”
…Potential for double the capacity to cover for intermittency and double the distribution network to get the power to where it’s needed. Hence the UK’s world-leading electricity prices for decades to come.
Once you investigate all of this you realise why the UK has the highest electricity prices in the whole world. We are governed by UN/WEF phony planet saving lackeys that put Technocrats and Globalists that want to control all of the worlds wealth, resources and people first, and you LAST.———– The UK is a tiny country in the general scheme of things regarding the alleged climate crisis and cannot come close to unilaterally making any differnce to global climate, yet we press on regardless pretending we are saving the world, or at least that is what the Political Class tell the people. —–We are saving NOTHING. But we are destroying our Industrial Base and forcing millions into energy poverty. ———-“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to RULE IT” —–Mencken
…and that IS the plan
Correct, because the UN/WEF say we have used up more than our fair share of the coal gas and oil in the ground and we are to stop doing that. Tragically our own Political Class AGREE. How traitorous is that?
Claire Coutinho, the Shadow Energy Secretary, blamed Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, for overseeing a system that is becoming unaffordable.
And what did you do to make our energy cheaper? Oh, yes! Sod all! I see this little creep has so much free time she can hold a meeting about the Godstone Hole which is just something local that the county council – Tories who ducked elections last year – should be arranging.
Yesterday UK demand was 50 GW. In the red zone. Gas was going full blast to cope. Wind was providing 14GW. On a very windy day.
It was a massive mistake to allow subsidised and mandated wind power to connect to the grid. Paul Burgess explains, its all about still winds and the failure of the official meteorologists to issue wind drought warnings. https://substack.com/home/post/p-180089713 Failing to check the wind supply has enabled the worst peacetime public policy on record, countless trillions spent on net zero programmes around the western world to get in return: more expensive electricity; blackouts looming in Germany, Britain and Australia; incalculable damage to the environment through the production chain from mining in the third world to disposal of an impending tsunami of toxic waste. The wind industry must be the only enterprise that ever survived without caring about the reliability of the supply chain for the major input. The combination of wind droughts and the cost of grid-scale storage guarantees that there will never be a transition to wind and solar because these “unreliables” are not fit for purpose to power a post-industrial society. Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply. https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-sinister-threat-of-wind-droughts Why did nobody take any notice of the… Read more »
Claire Coutino seems to have overlooked the fact that this idiotic policy really kicked off under a so-called Conservative Government ….. Treason May and the Jolly Green Giant, Johnson with his moronic “Saudi Arabia of Wind” claptrap.
Isn’t it a shame that so much time is devoted to the obvious. And more time is not devoted to making britain a more prosperous place to live. A country filled with beauty, that could easily attract major industries, but instead drives them away with high business tax,and all kinds of layers of bureaucracy for even the most minute project. I can see why britain is a failure, there has been a parade of incomoetent politicians who ignore the obvious and who pray on taxpayers, who dedicate themselves to the minority why the majority keep the country afloat. The ongoing, but never fixed energy situation is one great example of the incompetent parade of politicians, councils, judicial and taxpayers with no voice.
It infuriates me when the Tories lay into Milibrain for this. Yes, he’s a dangerous fanatic but the Tories had 14 years to stop this nonsense but instead they made it worse. Reform is our only hope.
What happened to our reasoning skills? We have some of the world’s best brains and universities but the quality of our politicians and policy makers leaves much to be desired! Our energy policy is a perfect example! Who would produce a product without the ability for it to reach the consumer? Where’s the “joined up”, big picture thinking? The lack of common sense is astounding! One can only assume that somewhere, palms are being greased unless someone can enlighten me as to an alternative reason! One thing is for certain, we’re paying way over the odds for our power, so the consumer always takes the hit for this madness!