£35m in one day.
Paid to switch wind off.
Tuesday 8 September was reportedly the most expensive day ever for balancing the British grid. About £35m, three times a normal day, mostly paying Scottish wind farms to turn down and English gas plants to turn up. The previous record was set the Friday before.
🌬️ What happened
Strong winds across Scotland produced more power than the cables south could carry. The operator has to keep supply and demand matched in every region, so it pays the wind to stop and pays gas near the demand to start.
Typical daily cost is £11m to £12m. Friday 4 September hit £32m. Tuesday hit £35m. The figure was reported by the Telegraph; NESO has not published its own number.
📊 The running total
About £1.5bn was spent on constraints in 2025, up from £1.23bn in 2024. NESO has warned it could reach £8bn a year by 2030 if the grid is not built fast enough.
One wind farm, Moray East, has received around £300m in constraint payments and was off about 60% of the time this year.
Around £50 of a typical annual electricity bill goes on balancing. Days like this are how that number grows.
🏠 The part that involves you
The waste is geographic. Too much power in the north, not enough wire to move it. The fix is wire, and it takes a decade.
The other fix is demand that moves. A household in Scotland using more when the wind is blowing is worth money. A household in the south using less at 6pm is worth money. Both cost nothing to build.
The grid already has a scheme that pays households to use more when there is a surplus. Almost nobody is signed up to it.
Britain paid £35m on a Tuesday to throw away clean electricity and burn gas instead. Not because the wind was wrong, but because nobody was ready to use it. Being ready is the whole product.