13 Jul 2026
Rachel Fletcher, director of economics at Octopus Energy, gave evidence last week to a Parliamentary Committee that grid constraint costs, already a staggering £1.5 bn per year, could hit £10 bn by 2030.
That means £10 billion each and every year paid to energy companies to turn off their wind turbines on windy days because the amount of power generated (mainly in Scotland) is far more than is needed in the local area. The grid doesn’t have the capacity to transmit this excess energy to where it could potentially be used – primarily in England.
Vast global corporations are among those benefiting from this nonsensical model, whereby the energy companies are paid whether they are generating power or not.
Typically, onshore wind farms in Scotland are being compensated for not producing around 30-40% of their planned power in any given year.
Yet wind farms are still being built.
In the Scottish Borders alone there are 29 windfarm applications in the pipeline, with 156 turbines in the ‘as yet undecided’ category and 169 turbines at the ‘project scoping’ stage, not including the hundreds of turbines already built. The Scottish Government’s Energy Consents Unit approves the vast majority of energy schemes, frequently overriding objections by local councils.
Octopus Energy is 100% committed to renewable energy, yet it highlights systemic problems in the current approach to energy generation in the UK, with rising bills for consumers and businesses, which will only get worse due to rising constraint costs.
Factor in the separate cost of upgrading the national grid – forecast at around £89bn by NESO – and the situation becomes even worse.
Nor is Octopus the only energy company to question the continual construction of windfarms in Scotland, all generating power which cannot be used.
In May this year the UK country manager for global energy company RWE told an industry conference that it “makes no sense” to build more wind capacity in Scotland.
Just last month, the UK head of EDF Energy told The Telegraph “we should stop building wind farms… we have this large [generating] infrastructure, twice as much as we need…”
Three energy bosses are all saying the same thing. But is anyone in the Scottish government listening?