Essay by Eric Worrall
First published JoNova; The Express claims a billion pounds per year is being paid to British wind turbine operators who have been asked to disconnect from the grid during periods of low demand, when nobody can use their electricity.
Britain wasting ‘millions a day’ in energy as wind farms told to turn off while bills soar
The UK has been squandering an estimated £1billion a year in energy as the National Grid’s infrastructure cannot handle the volumes of clean power currently being produced
By ANTONY ASHKENAZ10:01, Sun, Nov 6, 2022
…
Speaking to Express.co.uk, Andy Willis, the CEO of Kona Energy, warned that the UK has been spending millions of pounds a day to ask wind farms to stop generating electricity.
He said that this phenomenon, known as an energy constraint payment, means that “there’s basically times of the day when it’s so windy that the electrical infrastructure can’t accommodate the amount of wind that these wind farms are producing.
…
He said: “Over the last couple of years, [the amount spent] has been about £1billion pounds a year, and that is worth caveating by saying quite a complicated calculation. It’s not just the cost of paying wind farms to turn off, but it’s also the cost of paying the gas-fired power station to turn on somewhere.”
…
To solve this crisis, the UK needs to build more large-scale battery storage sites, which help harness renewable electricity, which is nine times cheaper than natural gas under current prices.
…
Batteries are impossibly expensive, so we’re more likely to see a flock of flying pigs than sufficient investment in batteries to make a significant difference to the renewable “constraint payment” problem.
There was some talk the British Government was going to cap payouts to green energy providers under Prime Minister Liz Truss, though I have no idea whether Prime Minister Rishi Sunak intends to continue the effort to curb green excesses. Liz Truss was replaced by Rishi Sunak after just 50 days in office.
The rational thing to do would be to halt the expansion of wind and solar energy until a solution is found. But if British politicians were behaving rationally about renewable energy, this problem would never have arisen in the first place.
I suspect this uncontrolled cash haemorrhage will continue until the consumer pain becomes unbearable, and Britain is forced to embrace the “Spanish solution” – an abrupt end to the favourable treatment of renewable energy providers.
<img src=”” title=”Green Fail: British Consumers Paying £1 billion per year for Wind Energy which Cannot be Used” />
