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.
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