Latest news with #WastedWind
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Britons pay £33m to switch off wind farms during Storm Floris
British households and businesses face a £33m bill for switching off wind farms during Storm Floris despite gusts of more than 100mph. Millions were spent on 'curtailing' the output of wind farms on Monday and Tuesday because the electricity network was too congested to accept their power. At the same time, grid operators had to spend a fortune firing up gas plants elsewhere in the country to provide replacement power. The estimated total cost of this was £14.4m on Monday and £19.3m on Tuesday, according to the Wasted Wind website. Grid balancing costs of this kind go straight on to consumer bills, meaning millions of households and businesses will pick up the tab. It came despite wind speeds of more than 100mph during Storm Floris, which caused widespread disruption including power cuts in Scotland. Constraint payments, as the switch-off costs are known in industry jargon, are becoming a growing problem as wind farms connect to the electricity network faster than grid upgrades are completed. This means that during windy periods there is frequently more power being generated than the grid can handle. There are particularly critical bottlenecks between England, where demand for power is highest, and Scotland, where most of the country's wind turbines are being built. Grid operators – who must constantly match supply with demand – take action through the so-called balancing system to temporarily switch off or turn down wind farm output. However, in some cases they must also pay for replacement electricity to be generated elsewhere if switch-offs are caused by grid capacity issues. Replacement power usually comes from gas-fired power plants. In a social media post on Wednesday, Robin Hawkes, a data expert at Octopus Energy who created the Wasted Wind website, said: 'Storm Floris brought wind gusts over 70mph to parts of Scotland this week, it was also one of the most expensive periods for wind curtailment this year. 'Currently the transmission boundaries between Scotland and England don't have the capacity to transmit all the wind energy to the demand further south. 'It's like having a glass constantly filling with water and a straw that's far too small, no matter how hard you suck you just can't drink any faster and the water will overflow. 'The result is that we have to switch off a lot of wind turbines in Scotland, and pay the wind farms to do this. 'The catch is that we still need the electricity further south so we also pay gas power plants to turn on in the south to cover the lost output.' Wasted wind power has cost Britain an estimated £752m so far this year – equivalent to more than £140,000 per hour. The cost has risen from £456m over the same period in 2024. The problem is expected to get worse before it gets better, with most major grid upgrades not expected to be completed until the end of this decade or later. As a result, costs are expected to keep rising to billions of pounds in the coming years. Sam Richards, of campaign group Britain Remade, said: 'Once again, Britain has spent tens of millions of pounds switching off cheap, clean wind power and turning on expensive gas plants – all because our electricity grid is stuck in the past. 'This isn't just a technical problem; it's an economic scandal. Households and businesses are paying higher bills and clean energy is being wasted because of our failure to invest. 'We urgently need to build a modern electricity grid that can move power from where it's generated to where it's needed. 'Without action, we'll keep throwing money away every time the wind blows. It's time to fix this bottleneck and build the 21st century infrastructure Britain desperately needs.'
Telegraph
04-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Wind turbine owners are getting money for nothing
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.
