WILL JONES

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.

By contrast, they have called for a regional electricity pricing system in which prices would be determined by supply and demand in each area.

Octopus has claimed bills would end up cheaper for everyone under this model because of the amount of wasteful spending that would be cut. Fewer pylons would also need to be built, the company says, as it would also encourage wind and solar farms to build schemes closer to major cities.

However, opponents including RenewableUK and SSE have warned this would create a “postcode lottery” and torpedo investment in wind farms that Mr Miliband needs to hit his clean energy targets on time.

Worth reading in full.

Via The Daily Sceptic

SALLUST

The UK’s Net Zero agenda is making families poorer by driving the productivity crisis and squeezing living standards, economists have said.

This shocking revelation features in a story in the Mail. Investment bank Peel Hunt commissioned a report in order to find out if there was a link between decarbonisation and Britain’s collapsing productivity:

They found a “clear link” between falling energy capacity and weak productivity in the UK, which has “hurt economic performance and growth in living standards”.

A decline in UK electricity supply, which began in 2006, coincided with the start of structural weakness in productivity growth, the research added.

The economists said their analysis challenges the Government’s claim that there is no trade-off between Net Zero and economic growth.

Prior to winning last year’s General Election, Labour pledged to decarbonise the UK’s electricity grid by 2030 as part of accelerating Net Zero efforts.

Since entering Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer has lifted a de facto ban on onshore wind farms in England and given consent for a slew of solar projects.

The PM has hailed Net Zero as “one of the economic opportunities” of this century, while business chiefs recently pointed to an £83 billion boost from the sector last year.

But the Tories have said the UK’s Net Zero target “leaves us economically worse off” and admitted putting the 2050 deadline into law was among “mistakes” they made when in power.

The report’s damning verdict was:

The result of the UK’s decarbonisation efforts, so far, appears to be weak economic growth, high energy prices, de-industrialisation and no significant impact on the overall trajectory of global emissions.

If an economy throttles its production of energy, it impairs its capacity to produce all types of goods and services. Productivity is the major driver of per capita GDP.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. If you’re in your 20s or 30s there’s something to look forward to (at least while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing):

“If the Government can stay on track with plans to build new renewable capacities, electricity supplies can rise sharply,” they added – although they warned new technology such as Artificial Intelligence would ramp up energy demands.

But that’s hardly what the Confederation of British Industry came out with:

The report contrasts with a recent analysis by the Confederation of British Industry that suggested the Net Zero sector in the UK has become a “powerhouse of job creation and economic expansion”.

But as the Daily Sceptic’s Chris Morrison points out, Net Zero is facing global collapse, while in the Telegraph Nick Timothy says Net Zero is a luxury we can no longer afford:

Decarbonisation in one country – or more accurately one continent – is only possible in a globalised economy. Britain has managed to reduce its carbon emissions at least in significant part by shedding its domestic industries and importing goods instead. This is obviously a pointless exercise, as global emissions increase when goods are manufactured in countries with dirtier energy sources and poorer environmental standards, and when the goods must be transported around the world.

The reality of decarbonisation – that as long as the policy runs faster than technology allows, and other countries do not follow our lead – is that it means deindustrialisation, with all the consequences that follow. The country is less resilient to shocks, supply chains are stretched and we are exposed to instability in other parts of the world.

The Mail‘s piece is worth reading in full.

Via The Daily Sceptic