9 Dec 2024
It’s set to be a record year for wind power in the UK – particularly with regards to how much goes to waste. The grid as it stands cannot cope, meaning that wind farms are paid to not run, which is particularly the case in Scotland.
When Storm Bert swept across the UK, some of the newest and biggest wind farms were forced to stand still.
According to Octopus Energy, so far this year the UK has spent more than £1 billion in “curtailment” – aka when wind turbines are paid to switch off at times of high winds to stop a surge in power overwhelming the grid. Households and businesses pay for the cost of this through their bills. This is significantly more than the £779 million spent last year and £945 million spent in 2022.
To translate this into energy lost, the amount of wind power “curtailed” in the first 11 months of 2024 stood at about 6.6 terawatt hours (TWh), according to official figures, up from 3.8 TWh in the whole of last year.
As a result, vast amounts of so-called cheap green power being generated in the Scottish Borders, and across the rest of the country, is going to waste.
The Scottish Government has set an ambitious target of achieving 20 gigawatts (GW) of low-cost renewable energy capacity by 2030, generating the equivalent of 50% of Scotland’s total energy demand.
Yet, a new report by Bloomberg NEF has found that the UK is lagging behind in the race to rewire the world’s power grids by investing four times more on renewable energy projects than on the electricity cables needed to connect them to the grid and consumers.
Investment in the grid is crucial.
However, it is believed that it takes about twice the amount of time to establish new transmission lines, so the system cannot keep pace.
If there aren’t the cables and grid connections, wind turbines could be forced to stand idle, leading to less energy security and higher power prices for the foreseeable.
As it stands, people in the Borders are paying energy firms not to use the wind farm they have built in our communities and countryside.
Given the very tight public finances as we have seen from the latest Scottish budget, the cost of constraint payments is a national scandal.
In the Borders we have seen these wind farms alter our landscape, and we have to look at them day in, day out. Why is so much money going into developing these wind farms when ultimately, we have to pay the operators for the energy not to be produced? It is a scandalous waste of money.