We paid one and a half billion pounds
to switch wind farms off.
Britain spent roughly £1.5bn in a single year telling wind farms to stop making electricity, and then paying gas plants to make it instead. That is not a typo, and it is on your bill. Here is why it happens, and why it is quietly the best argument for putting a battery in your house.
🪫 The wires are too small
Most of Britain's wind is in Scotland. Most of Britain's demand is in England. The cables between the two are not big enough to carry it all.
So on a windy day the turbines make more power than the wires can move south. Something has to give, and what gives is the turbines. The grid operator rings up and asks them to stop.
Because the wind farm had a contract to sell that electricity, it has to be compensated for the money it just lost. That is a constraint payment. In 2025 those payments came to around £380m.
🔥 And then we buy the power twice
Here is the part that stings. England still needs the electricity. So a gas plant somewhere in England is asked to fire up and make it instead.
Gas is expensive, and gas at short notice is very expensive. That cost was around £1.08bn.
So we paid once to not have clean electricity, and again to have dirty electricity. Roughly £1.46bn all in. Around 98% of the curtailed wind is Scottish.
🔋 A battery in a house in Glasgow is worth more than one in Guildford
The clean fix is more cable, and that is being built, slowly, at enormous cost, over years.
The cheap fix is to use the electricity where it already is, at the moment it exists. A home battery in Scotland charging on a windy Tuesday afternoon is doing exactly what an expensive new cable would do, except it already exists and it is in your garage.
Left alone, this bill is heading for £8bn a year by 2030. That is not a forecast about wind farms. That is a forecast about your standing charge.
We are paying to throw away free electricity, and then paying again to burn gas to replace it. Somewhere in Scotland a turbine is standing still on a windy day because nobody could think of anything better to do with the power. Your hot water tank has some thoughts.