Wind Curtailment Costs To Rise To £3 Billion By 2030
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
It appears that the BBC will print any nonsense it is handed by the renewable/climate lobby:
Wasted wind power will add £40 to the average UK household’s electricity bill in 2023, according to a think tank.
That figure could increase to £150 in 2026, Carbon Tracker has estimated.
When it is very windy, the grid cannot handle the extra power generated. Wind farms are paid to switch off and gas-powered stations are paid to fire up. The cost is passed on to consumers.
The government said major reforms will halve the time it takes to build energy networks to cope with extra wind power.
Most of the UK’s offshore wind farms are in England – Dogger Bank off the coast of Yorkshire is the largest in the world. Meanwhile, around half of onshore wind farms are in Scotland but most electricity is used in south-east England.
Carbon Tracker said the main problem in getting electricity to where it is needed is a bottleneck in transmission between Scotland and England.
The practice of switching off wind farms and ramping up power stations is known as "wind curtailment" and the costs are passed on to consumers, it said.
Carbon Tracker researches the impact of climate change on financial markets. It said since the start of 2023, wind curtailment payments cost £590m, adding £40 to the average consumer bill.
It warned those costs were set to increase to add £180 per year to bills by 2030, due to wind farms being built faster than the power cabling needed to transmit the electricity.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67494082
For a start, they can’t even get their numbers right.
They say that wind constraint payments cost £590 million this year. Households however only use a third of electricity generated, so they are only directly paying about £196 million towards the bill. This equates to £7 per home, not £40.
They have also got their logic upside down. It is not “wasted wind power”, but the constraint payments that households are paying for. The answer is simple – refuse to pay them.
The problem, of course, is not “lack of infrastructure”, as they claim. It is that we ever built so many wind farms in Scotland, so far away from consumers, who will have to pay for all of this infrastructure as well. Yet we still have not learnt our lesson and are carrying on building even more. According to Carbon Tracker, constraint payments could rocket to over £3 billion by 2030.
https://carbontracker.org/reports/gone-with-the-wind/
It’s like subsidising new factories in the middle of nowhere in the Scottish Highlands, but not building any road links.
As the BBC is suddenly concerned about energy bills, maybe it should remind its readers that they are already paying some £1.2 billion to subsidise Scotland’s onshore wind farms every year.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The Scottish government encourages and approves the building of onshore wind farms in Scotland’s best landscape, preumably because it thinks it is the green thing to do. I wonder if the Scottish government knows there is not sufficient grid capacity to transmit the electricity to consumers in England. I suspect, based on the history of the Scottish government, that is too stupid to realise it.
No they are very clever ! They get paid for NOT supplying England with power, and in the future they have us over a barrel in independence negotiations because we have stupidly become dependent on them for wind power.
” and in the future they have us “…”us?” We are not bots.
Us English bots then. Are you Scottish?
The onshore wind farm builders do realise it, which is why much of the projects in the recent Government “auction” were where the wind constraint payments is most likely. Nothing like being paid not to produce, which might include a lot of politicians.
Or possibly the onshore wind farms are actually happy for there to be insufficient infrastructure if they can then double sell their electricity by selling the constraint paid electricity to off grid local customers.
Net Zero Watch says the two wind farms (Moray east and Beatrice) may be taking advantage of a loophole in the system that allows generators to be paid twice for the same electricity, with consumers footing the bill.
Deputy director Andrew Montford said: “Although constraints payments are widely understood as a payment to switch off, in fact the rules only require generators to keep the power away from the transmission grid. If they can divert it elsewhere, for example to a battery, they can receive the constraint payment and still sell the power.”
The think tank said it has brought the loophole to the attention of the energy regulator, Ofgem.
As the National Grid explains, constraint payments occur where power cannot be transmitted to where it is needed, usually due to congestion at one or more points on the network.
Who negotaited these contracts? Friends of the developers?
The Low Carbon Contracts Company has closed the loophole.
https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/resources/guidance-and-publications/cfd-co-location-generator-guidance/
In addition, supply to offshore oil and gas platforms is now banned altogether for CFD generators.
Who’s at fault here? Would a house developer get planning permission to build houses which did not have full access to electricity, gas, water, internet or sewage?
Having said that, the whole purpose of the Net Zero Strategy of course is to limit our access to these utilities.
And BTW £40/year is still considerably lower than the BBC subsidy of £159/year per household.
Those developing wind farms with good intentions, like Octopus Energy, are thwarted by extremely long grid connection timescales. National Grid is either unwilling or unable to provide the grid connections needed on anything approaching a sensible timescale and that needs to be addressed urgently otherwise our low carbon initiatives are indeed being badly constrained.
“Those developing wind farms with good intentions, like Octopus Energy,”
On what authority are you claiming Octopus Energy are developing wind farms with good intentions? Please explain why, exactly, you are making that claim.
David,
building more wind generators does little to constrain our low carbon initiaiative. They really are a dreadful way to make electrcicty and cannot operate with out the support of gas generation.
The ownership of the windfarms that were going to make Scotland rich
I wouldn’t label Carbon Tracker a think tank. It is yet another climate change lobby organisation.
“Wind farms are paid to switch off and gas-powered stations are paid to fire up.”
This is a little fruzzy. Are the spinning blades stopped because of too strong breezes? Or are the electrons not sure where to go? And why are gas-powered ugly electrons sent onto the grid while the pretty green ones are not wanted.
I must be the only person in the world that is confused by using 14th centaury technology to power a modern world.
Because these lovely green electrons are produced in Scotland where they are not needed but are unable to be sent to England, where they are needed, because of the lack of infrastructure? Hence the gas plants in England need to produce the ugly electrons even though there are lots of green electrons arriving in Scotland.
Geography is the answer.
Wind towers can be moved so the electrons have a shorter distance to need.
Less wind. Sure. But still makes more sense.
Economics of wind farms dictates that it is better to receive ROC subsidies paid on actual production (and ditto for CFDs at older, higher strike prices), and then be paid to curtail when transmission constraints occur. Production onshore in England is typically much lower, so it would garner far fewer subsidies or constraint payment opportunities.
So the wind farm owners have not built the transmission infrastructure to bring their product to the market. Best they start paying to build it.
When a farmer grows a crop is it the customer who has to build the roads and tracks to get access to it? Or the farmer builds tracks to get to market?
Also, what is the nonsense that when there are wind constraints applied gas power stations get fired up?
Thats another BBC lie. The Gas stations fire in calm conditions when there are no constraint payments because there’s no wind power being generated!
Spot on, Bobn! Why should Sainsbury’s make the customer pay when they can’t get their produce to the stores because of a fuel strike or motorway hold-up?
There’s a lot of brown envelopes involved in ruinables but the culprits will get away with it. B……s
You might think so. But OFGEM has decided that all TNUoS transmission charges and all BSUoS balancing mechanism charges should be simply spread across customer bills. This has applied since April, and is why standing charges have shot up so much.
Thinking about this, surely it’s not wasted it’s unusable electricity. Eventually, the Glorious day of Net Zero dawns, we’ll have an over supply of wind generated electricity just as now, we won’t be able to use it then either despite claims of wonderful ways of storing over production.
We are already at that point. Claims that curtailment is only about lack of transmission capacity ring hollow when you see Hornsea collecting constraint payments. As capacity increases we will see more and more curtailment for lack of demand (including via interconnectors, where similar surpluses will be competing to harvest subsidies in the destination countries). Plus the EU want to tax our electricity exports as an act of protectionism for their own renewables, wrapping it up in nonsense about carbon border taxes.
What the BBC idiot doesn’t understand is that ,for stability, the grid needs 50% rotating machinery at any one time.
Time he took some lessons in simple mechanics
He/she probably has a degree in something really relevant rather like Rowlatt’s.
There are alternatives but they tend to be quite expensive. Grid batteries are providing some of the inertia replacement via frequency support ancillary contracts that require them to charge or discharge when grid frequency gets out of line. Much harder to replace is the ability to handle short circuit currents (e.g. from lightning strikes) and to supply reactive power, which corrects phase deviations between voltage and current waveforms – something that wind farms tend to make worse. Again, there are some solutions that are costly, some of which are not really proven for more extreme problem handling.
The problem: It is that we ever built so many wind farms in Scotland, so far away from consumers.
– – –
But the developers know that’s where a lot of the best wind conditions are.
I can see Carbon Tracker game here is to make the case for even more investment in transmission assets but they fail to explain that is just further hidden costs that get added onto bills. At least it shines a light on the crazy situation that has been allowed to develop with renewables being allowed on the system despite lack of transmission capacity and then being paid to switch off. The more this nonsense gets exposed the more joe public may question whats going and wheres our promised cheap leccy.
Gas and coal power are workers who turn up when you need them
Wind power is an unreliable worker who turns up or goes home when he feels like it
.. and gets THREE times the hourly rate
.. oh, and has to come from a great distance so imposes huge grid transportation costs.
So a grid with windpower is massively more expensive than one without.
So everything you pay for costs a lot more
that’s thousands of pounds per household per year.
Yet today’s new bulletins spoke of a £40 a household extra cost cos the grid can’t handle extra wind
Dream on if you think wind only costs you £40/year extra
Radio Humberside is closely aligned with wind industry PR and the item quoted the wind industry lobby group RenewablesUK so I guess it’s PRasNews for them
@BBCScienceNews tweeted
Wasted wind power adds £40 to household energy bills, says think tank
What’s the story got to do with science ?
“think tank” = lobbyists for particular interests
so “BBC Science News” = amplifying wind lobby PR
BBCscienceNews really equals BBCgreenPoliticalCampaigning
I know someone who promotes such schemes as windfarms and swears they are making a big reduction in CO2.
Yet. he and his family frequently fly to their apartment in Spain
.. I daren’t ask him about his own CO2
and obvious contradiction.
The main BBC tweet has just 80 Likes
but of the 60 replies most are from green cultists.
but 20% are from realists who mock the BBC bias
.. https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1736998826542571959
Correct. The platform is clearly being made available to promite any leftie twaddle by default. This alone SHOULD send seismic waves through Parliament with a serious debate tabled to censure and remove from office those in the hierarchy because of their clear involvement in permitting this political capture of the BBC. The left play to win not to follow rules. When are we going to wake up to this?