The UK pays wind turbines for failure — so the market wants to install more failures
By Jo Nova
When failure becomes a commodity…
Ponder for a moment how intrinsically unsuitable, maladapted, and worthless wind turbines are to a grid. Their failure is so comprehensive, multifaceted and inevitable, an entirely new and bizarre market was invented to reward their failures. Even when they generate electricity, if the time is wrong, the demand is low, or the network can’t handle it, they will still be paid. The grid can’t use the power, but the customer still gets slugged for something they didn’t use, or they couldn’t get. In the UK the costs for this useless power grew to nearly £400 million last year.
The largest provider of useless power was SeaGreen wind plant which made nearly twice as much from being “constrained” than from being of service. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) reports that SeaGreen earned £100 million for making electricity, and £200 million for being “constrained”. Effectively, the useful electricity it made costs a shocking £2.70 a kilowatt hour, after the other payments are included.
Obviously, when the government rewards failure, the market responds by planning to fail. It follows then that industrial wind plant developers would be bonkers if they weren’t looking for sites where their output would arrive at the worst possible time, or through the most remote and overloaded corner of the network.
Everything about the wind industry has “Rent Seeker” tattooed all over it.
Net Zero Watch condemns new windfarm rip-off
Campaign group Net Zero Watch has condemned the renewables industry rip-off of electricity consumers. New data published by the Renewable Energy Foundation reveals that the cost of paying windfarms to switch off soared by 91% in 2024. These payments are necessary when the grid has insufficient capacity to deliver the power to market. Nearly £400 million was paid to windfarms in 2024, and much more than this in indirect costs [1].
The largest single recipient was Seagreen, a new windfarm off the coast of Angus, which received nearly £200 million in these so-called “constraint payments”.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
The Renewable Energy Foundation suggest that Seagreen is making around £270 for each megawatt hour it actually produces, more than three times market averages, because it’s so lucrative to be switched off. This is a truly obscene rip-off of the consumer.
Windfarms seem to be being deliberately built in Scottish waters, where they will receive lucrative payments to be switched off.
And there are huge numbers of new windfarms planned for Scottish waters, where they will be just as constrained. So the rip-off is only going to get worse.
[1] When windfarms have to switch off, their customers still need power, so it is necessary to pay a gas-fired power station to switch on to meet demand.
SeaGreen wind plant has about 114 towers in the ocean east of Scotland. It could make about 1 gigawatt in theoretical capacity if all the turbines were working, but its actual load factor was a pathetic 14%. Of course, as a subsidy farm, it’s load factor was 200%.
Imagine a coal plant that earned money every time it had to slow down because customers weren’t using as much electricity as the power plant could have made?
h/t to Andrew Montford @Dissentient
