UK’s wasted wind power laid bare by new Octopus tracking tool
Britain wasted £649m already this year powering down wind farms as there is not enough grid capacity to send renewable energy where it is needed, utility finds
Octopus Energy has launched a live ticker tool that shows how much wind power the “broken” UK electricity grid is wasting due to curtailment.
Currently, the ticker states that the UK has wasted a whopping £649m ($885m) through having to switch off wind turbines this year alone.
One of the UK’s largest wind farms – Seagreen, a 1.1GW array off the Scottish coast – is paid to curtail 71% of the time it could be generating, said Octopus. As a result, it said the effective cost of power it generates is four times higher than it should be.
“It’s crazy to build wind farms where there’s no grid, then pay them to sit idle, and then pay the most expensive fossil fuel plants to generate the power instead,” said Octopus head of customer experience Pete Miller.
“Octopus was clear with customers that the energy crisis was caused by the cost of gas, and now we need to be clear that high electricity prices are the cost of a broken energy system.”
Curtailment occurs when there is not enough grid capacity to send power from variable wind and solar farms where it is needed, and when there is more power supply than demand in any given area.
The UK is often forced to switch off wind farms in Scotland, as there is not enough transmission capacity to send power to southern demand centres in England where it is needed. There is also a lack of sufficient energy storage, whether that be in battery systems or pumped hydro facilities, to save excess power for later.
Octopus has championed a proposal UK energy secretary Ed Miliband is currently consulting on, switching the UK to a zonal pricing system, to solve this.
It is argued such a system would encourage developers to build new wind and solar farms nearer demand centres, and also encourage heavy power users, like data centres, to set up shop where there is currently an oversupply of green energy.
Most renewables developers are however against the idea due to uncertainty it would cause.
Whatever the solution to wind farm curtailment, Octopus says that constraint costs are currently on track to cost the UK a “staggering” £8bn a year by 2030. The £649m in wind power the UK has wasted this year is already over £200m more than the same time last year, it says.
(Copyright)