Wind Farms Paid £136m To Switch Off Last Year

By Paul Homewood

Wind farms were paid up to £3 million per day to switch off their turbines and not produce electricity last week, The Telegraph can disclose.

Energy firms were handed more than £12 million in compensation following a fault with a major power line carrying electricity to England from turbines in Scotland.

The payouts, which will ultimately be added onto consumer bills, were between 25 per cent and 80 per cent more than the firms, which own giant wind farms in Scotland, would have received had they been producing electricity, according to an analysis of official figures.

The payments have prompted questions in Parliament, as one charity warned that consumers were having to fund the consequences of an "excessive" number of onshore wind farms, which can overwhelm the electricity grid.

In December an analysis by the Renewable Energy Foundation, a charity that monitors energy use, revealed that the operators of 86 wind farms in Britain were handed more than £136 million in so-called "constraint payments" last year – a new record.

REF has warned that consumers are left to foot the bill for wind farm operators having to reduce their output as a result of an "excessive" number of turbines in Scotland leaving the electricity grid unable to cope on occasions such as when there are strong winds.

The Western Link, a 530-mile high-voltage cable running from the west coast of Scotland to the north coast of Wales, was built to help overcome the problem by providing more capacity to transport green energy from onshore wind farms in Scotland, to England and Wales.

But the line, which became fully operational in 2018, has been dogged by difficulties.

In the latest incident, it "tripped" on Jan 10, prompting a spike in the number of wind farms being asked to shut down temporarily because they were producing more energy than could be transported to consumers’ homes.

On the following day – last Saturday – 50 wind farms were asked to stop producing electricity, and given a total of £2.5 million in compensation to do so. Last Wednesday, the figure was as high as £3.3 million, which was paid out to £3.3 million wind farms by National Grid’s Electricity System Operator (ESO) arm.

This weekend the payments continued to be made as the power line remained out of use amid an investigation into the cause of the fault.

Dr John Constable, director of REF, which first exposed the scale of "constraint payments, said: "The Scottish Government has permitted excessive and environmentally damaging growth in wind power north of the border which has put the electricity system under great strain and burdened English and Welsh consumers not only with constraint payments but also with the additional expense of a £1 billion interconnector that is itself proving unreliable. The environment and the consumer have been betrayed over and over again.”

Viscount Ridley, the science writer and former businessman, has now put down a series of written questions in the House of Lords about the Western Link and its cost to taxpayers.

However a National Grid ESO spokesman insisted that the cost of managing the amount of electricity in the grid amounted to just £1 of the average annual household bill of £554."

"The alternative to constraint payments is building more electricity transmission assets which is more costly, meaning consumers’ bills would rise,” the spokesman added.

A National Grid spokesman confirmed that the link was "currently unavailable for service" while the cause of the outage was being investigated.

Luke Clark, director of strategic communications at RenewableUK, which represents green energy companies, said: “Since the turn of the year, wind energy has been the UK’s biggest source of electricity and would have provided more if the grid were operating at full power.

"Wind generators are compensated as being forced to stop generating because of grid failures means a significant loss of revenue. Bringing the Western Link fully back online as soon as possible is the best solution for renewable energy generators and consumers”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/19/wind-farms-paid-3-million-per-day-switch-turbines/

The worst thing about these restraint payments is that wind farm operators don’t only get paid for the value of electricity, but also the value of the subsidy foregone, in this case the Renewables Obligation.

John Constable has helpfully listed the payments made last week, and the they work out at around £68/MWh. The current RO subsidy is £48.78/MWh:

https://ref.org.uk/ref-blog/356-the-western-link-a-new-failure-highlights-the-overbuild-of-scottish-wind-and-raises-new-questions

The Telegraph contains two highly misleading comments:

1) However a National Grid ESO spokesman insisted that the cost of managing the amount of electricity in the grid amounted to just £1 of the average annual household bill of £554."

It does no take a genius to work out that £136m spread over approximately 27m households comes to an average of £5, and not £1. Presumably National Grid have played the usual trick of not counting the extra cost paid for by non-domestic users

2) "The alternative to constraint payments is building more electricity transmission assets which is more costly, meaning consumers’ bills would rise,” the [National Grid] spokesman added.

This is an outright lie, which I’m amazed the Telegraph allowed to be printed without challenge.

The reality is that every MW of wind capacity has to be backed up by reliable, dispatchable capacity.

The Western Link alone is estimated to have cost £1bn, and this does not include the cost of constructing other transmission lines purely to distribute wind power, such as Beauly-Denny. The cost of these should be recharged to wind farms, and not charged to bill payers.

There is therefore no need for wind farms, or the associated transmission interconnectors, unless they are economically self supporting, without subsidies and restraint payments.

Of course. £130m is still chicken feed.

But. regardless of the specific issues around Scottish wind farms, restraint payments will inevitable mushroom in years to come, if wind capacity increases in line with targets. This is because there will be far too much capacity at times when it is windy or demand is low.

It is a problem the government quickly needs to get to grips with, by making clear that restraint payments will be not be tolerated in future.