Wind turbine owners are getting money for nothing

Telegraph

04-03-2025

We could have rebuilt a couple of hospitals. Or bought 45 new Challenger tanks. Or restored the winter fuel allowance to 800,000 of the neediest pensioners.
Even allowing for inflation, there are still lots of things you could do with £250m. Instead, as The Telegraph revealed on Monday, over the first two months of this year we spent it on paying wind farms to switch off their turbines.
That is crazy.
We are spending vast sums of money we don't have on a power system that has become completely dysfunctional and which has landed us with electricity that is cripplingly expensive. We need to start fixing that before the country is bankrupted and our industry wiped out.
In principle, generating electricity from wind should be a perfect solution, especially for a country such as the UK where, if we are being honest, it can be a little blustery at times. It doesn't involve any carbon emissions, it will never run out and it can be generated domestically.
Boris Johnson used to talk about turning the UK into the ' Saudi Arabia of wind ' and while there may have been some characteristic hyperbole in that promise, there was nothing wrong with the ambition. The technology could have been ideal for the UK.
The trouble is, it is not working out as planned. Bottlenecks in the network of cables that move electricity around the country mean that at crucial times wind farms have to be switched off to prevent the grid from becoming overloaded.
So far this year, operators have been paid up to on average just under £180,000 an hour to switch off their turbines because there is nowhere for the power to go. The so-called constraint payments have already cost an extraordinary £252m in the first two months of 2025, up from £158m over the same period last year, an increase of 60pc.
In effect, Britain is paying more and more for these farms to do nothing. Even worse, while the wind farms sit idle, other generators, very often a gas plant, have to cover shortfalls in the network where power is needed.
Last Friday afternoon, £79,507 was spent on switching off wind turbines while £1.2m was spent buying energy elsewhere, according to the Wasted Wind website, which analyses Elexon market data.
The British energy market appears to have stepped through the looking glass, into a weird dysfunctional world where we pay green wind farms to sit idle and then pay even more for fossil fuels to provide a back-up. Even the most twisted satirist would find that hard to make up. It is surreal.
Sure, you can argue that this is just a teething problem and that as we complete the transition from fossil fuels to green energy, it will sort itself out. Perhaps it will, although most of us would take a lot of persuading to believe that anything Ed Miliband, the Energy Minister, is in charge of will ever 'sort itself out'.
The trouble is, there is not much sign of it. The constraint payments are soaring, when in reality they should be coming down. If they are just a bug, they have not been ironed out yet. Instead, the costs keep rising.
In reality, Britain does not have the luxury of this kind of self-indulgence any more. We have created a system that delivers some of the most expensive electricity in the world for both domestic and industrial users. Only last week, Ofgem announced the third consecutive rise in the energy price cap, with an increase of £111 for the average bill kicking in from April.
We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the world, running at almost double the level of competitors such as France and Spain. This has triggered the closure of chemical plants, such as Ineos's Grangemouth refinery, and imposed impossible costs on many others.
Of course, 'constraint payments' to wind farms are far from the only reason for that. But let's put this politely. They certainly aren't helping. And they are emblematic of how the UK has, under successive governments, created one of the most dysfunctional energy systems in the world.
Indeed, as an analysis by Peel Hunt made clear this week, declining electricity production is one of the main explanations for why the UK has fallen so far behind the United States since the financial crash of 2008. If we had not got that so badly wrong, we would not be struggling with zero growth.
It is madness.
Everyone agrees – well, almost everyone – that cutting carbon emissions is important and that the UK should switch to renewable energy (although given that we only account for 1pc of global emissions, it is questionable whether we really need to be a global leader in that).
But that does not mean we need to abandon basic common sense, or forget the rules of economics.
Wind power may well be an important part of the mix, though we should remain agnostic on that until we have more hard evidence. But if it is, we need to make sure we build it in the right way.
We should put the pylons in place to distribute the power and build the storage systems to save it when necessary before building the wind farms – and not the other way around.
And we should subject every project to a cold, sober cost-benefit analysis and stop brushing aside inconvenient truths – to borrow a phrase loved by the climate change gang – with some waffle about a ' green industrial revolution '.
Instead, every time the weather turns blustery, we are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to switch the wind turbines off.