Energy bills to rise £200 a year ‘to pay for wasted wind power’
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Energy bills will rise £200 a year within a decade to pay for wasted wind power as new turbines in Scotland are paid to switch off, according to new forecasts.
Poor electricity grid infrastructure means energy created by turbines in Scotland cannot reach homes in England on very windy days.
Last year Britain wasted enough wind power for a million homes, but new turbines built over the next decade would see that figure grow fivefold by 2030, according to think tank Carbon Tracker.
The cost to pay wind farms to switch off at these times and buy gas to fill in the shortfall would rise to £3.5 billion a year, according to Carbon Tracker’s analysis. That would add an average of £200 to annual household energy bills.
Bottlenecks in the planning process
The problem has been blamed on bottlenecks in the planning process which can take up to seven years for major new electricity cable projects.
Meanwhile, the construction of wind farms has grown steadily to help meet the Government’s net zero goals.
As a result, wind generation in Scotland is expected to grow four times faster by 2030 than the cables required to send the power across the border.
Scotland can currently produce 10GW of electricity from its wind farms on peak days, but the grid has the capacity to transport just 6GW.
With Scotland accounting for just 10 per cent of the country’s electricity demand, an excess of power would be created on days with high wind and low demand if turbine owners were not paid to switch off.
National Grid paid Scottish wind farms to stop generating on more than 200 occasions last year while paying gas power stations in England to increase output to compensate.
“The electricity grid is not fit for purpose because investments are not increasing in step with the rapid growth of wind power,” said report author Lorenzo Sani.
“Without significant improvement in the permitting timeframes for critical energy transmission infrastructure – the grid can’t support the Government’s plans to decarbonise generation by 2035 or deliver on its vision of ‘affordable, homegrown, clean energy’.”
Instead of spending yet more billions on transmission infrastructure, I have a better idea – simply stop all further development of wind power in Scotland, and concentrate it only where there is already sufficient transmission capacity.
And if this is such a big problem already, just wait till we have the 45GW of offshore wind power promised!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
They claim that wind (and solar) are the cheapest form of energy, so there can compete with reliable sources at the market price. That alone causes the up/down of reliable sources to be more expensive, yet renewables still need subsidies.
I suggest that rather reliable generation is preferred and renewables are only used when needed or they are exported to the Continent.
This is a scam. As with all crimes, follow the money. In his book, Free to Choose, Milton Friedman is quoted stating, “When you start paying people to not work, they will be lined up for the job.” Bringing that sentiment into modern terms, “When you start paying energy companies to not produce electricity, the windmills will spring up like Spring flowers.” It is time for an audit of the personal finances of the cretins approving this scam–you are being sold to the highest political contributor.
https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/3-graphs-say-it-all-for-renewables/
The best thing would be to just pay for electricity supplied to the grid .
If it were not for the massive subsidies paid for the unreliable generation , costs for consumers would be a lot lot lower .
But subsidies , balancing and transmission costs make all of the wind and solar very expensive .
So the whole thing is a deliberate fraud to take money from the people , just like the Marxists / socialists have always planned .
Meant to add this on to my post .https://www.technocracy.news/un-agenda-2030-a-recipe-for-global-socialism/
The whole market has become so distorted that its difficult not to wonder what is in it for the printed media which used to jump such rackets without much hesitation. They have been compromised by the amount of advertising they have been able to sell on the ‘virtues’ of renewables. Certainly that was the case reported in Scotland where the SNP was such a source of revenue.
There is amusement to be had if you know where to look. Yacht racing off The Hague yesterday ( You Tube etc) was in winds of Force 2-3 . Long shots of the competitors included wind turbines at sea. They were static.
The Hollandse Kust Zuid windfarm off Scheveningen (the name was used as a password in WW II because Germans always failed to pronounce it properly) has suffered construction delays. Its final turbine blade was installed yesterday and it will now undergo commissioning. At 1.5GW it will play havoc with the BritNed interconnector. Part of the output will be fed to the PosHYdon project to make green hydrogen offshore, which will be added to offshore gas production. All in penny volumes, yet at huge cost. It’s the idea that counts
When you have morons in charge, you get moronic ‘solutions’. You would think that by now somebody (anybody) in government would wake up to reality. But no, all we get is more idiots in charge.
“When you have morons in charge, you get moronic ‘solutions’.”
John Selwyn Gummer, Ed “Potatohead” Davey and the rest of the politicians and snivel serpent troughsnouting non-executive directors of all the taxpayer-bilking companies building windfarms and solar farms paid by taxpayer subsidies that are going to be paid not to produce electricity for the foreseeable future may well be morons, but they are bloody rich morons, courtesy of the supine taxpayer.
If they’re paid out of our pockets to build the filthy things they should be responsible for the cost of coupling them up to the grid, but of course that won’t ever happen
Unless a market is free no one knows the true price of anything least of all civil servants. There is so much interference, political posturing, and corrupt energy contracts that we are all in the dark.
So the CEO of Ofgem, who I understand wrote the CCA, has designed our electricity system to be run on intermittent renewables that require subsidies, with a parallel system of fossil fuel generators to provide grid stability and backup and where excess power is sold at negative prices to avoid/reduce constraint payments:
UK ‘power dumping’ raises concerns over energy management :
I have just come across this clip of Just Stop Oil protestors and a member of the public taking action. Just watch the police. They are perfectly happy to do Sweet FA about “protestors” breaking the law but as soon as a normal person intervenes to go about his lawful business they suddenly become quite violent and aggressive. Seems only certain people have rights and the police are there to protect them. Me and you? Nah we have NO rights.
Sickening isn’t it?
Off topic, maybe, re Scotland’s ferry fiasco:
The build cost for both was agreed at £97m, now sitting six years later, at ca. £350m and both incomplete. Meantime, the Auditor General Scotland recently went through the now ‘nationalised’ shipyards’ books and concluded he cannot find where the ‘extra’ costs have vanished into.
Meantime, the Scottish procurement wing called CALMAC have four ferries built on time at contracted cost (less than two years) and delivered from shipyards in Poland and Turkey, for about £20m per vessel.
A wee video below wherein a top Scottish ship designer ‘nearly’ states the obvious
https://www.barrheadboy.com/through-a-scottish-prism-midweek-special-fickle-ferries/
I’ve not been able to look at the detailed methodology and calculations behind this study, but I suspect it rather underestimates the problem since it appears to concentrate only on curtailment of Scottish windfarms due to lack of grid capacity to handle larger outputs. The problem is also going to arise further South as capacity is added. Creyke Beck near Hull is destined to become a major choke point as the connection point for the Dogger Bank wind farms, and already National Grid is looking to build more transmission from there to High Marnham (site of a former coal station), and presumably points further SOuth in due course.
Curtailment will not be just for transmission constraints, but also simply because there will be an overall surplus at times of highish winds and low to medium demand. It’s all going to get a lot more expensive, especially as the cost of wind farms isn’t going down.
The accounts for 2022 for HYWIND, the floating offshore wind farm will be available in 10 days time.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08709450/filing-history
With its 3.5ROC/MWh subsidy, they will have been sure to avoid any curtailment. It will be interesting to see just how much they have made from market price sales. We know from the ROC returns at Energy Trends that they got 946,181 ROCs in 2022, of which 202,801 was in the first quarter at the 2021/22 ROC prices. Generation totalled 270,337MWh.
Hywind is intriguing because of its very high capacity factors, the best in the N. Sea. Iirc, they’ve reported well over 50% at times. Yet the turbines are “only” 6 MW, half the size of the latest units so the performance is remarkable.
Digging around on the Siemens website, I learnt that they have an uprated 7 MW model which uses beefier generating kit with the same rotor and nacelle. Is it possible that the turbines are actually 7 MW units which would explain the apparent performance?
No. I think that Statoil simply had excellent knowledge of where to site the wind farm, and the freedom of no water depth constraint. It’s in a particularly consistently windy location. Such sites are far from ubiquitous.Much better than say Moray East and Beatrice, which get becalmed because they lie under an interface between weather systems quite frequently, although they are not that far away.
Correction: the Hywind ROCs were 487,674 of which 155,103 were in Q1, with total generation of 139,335MWh. There is now also the Kindcardine offshore wind farm that started up belatedly also entitled to 3.5ROCs/MWh. Figures from OFGEM ROC database.
Hywind results are now in.
Turnover £47.742m for 139,335MWh (51.5% of capacity) gives average proceeds of £342.64/MWh
Market price sales were £24.859m or £178.41/MWh
ROCs were worth £22.840m or £163.92/MWh of subsidy (actually a low sales realisation of just £46.83/ROC on average) – which will be protected from windfall profits tax this year.
Cost of sales was £19.320m (£138.66/MWh), of which £14.046m was depreciation and £1.154m was lease costs. That leaves operating and maintenance expenses of £4.120m, or £29.57/MWh. There are no significant interest costs, perhaps surprisingly, because the project is entirely shareholder financed and providing handsome dividends. Perhaps we should allow for at least £10m in underlying financing costs for what started as a £300m project.
The AR5 CFD auction maximum price for floating offshore wind is £116/MWh in 2012 money, or £154.86/MWh indexed to current levels. It is hard to see this as being particularly profitable, even with the higher capacity factors attained by Hywind. Imagine it as an input to making green hydrogen stored and used as CCGT fuel, and you are looking at over £600/MWh to cover for when the wind doesn’t blow. Yet the CCC thinks this is part of attaining net zero.