So far in 2025, Britain has wasted £1,112,293,718 switching off wind turbines and paying gas plants to switch on.

18 comments

1. I don’t think the people who have designed the system this way consider it a “waste”. More “all according to plan”.

2. The compensation for wind farm operators seems high but until the pricing models contracts are due for renewal it’s unlikely to change.

   The gas plants are being turned on to either balance the grid or make up for a deficit in renewable generation.

3. This “waste” is happening because of our refusal to move to a zonal pricing system and invest in better grid infrastructure.

   Wind turbines in Scotland bid on the unified UK price, which includes high-demand, low-supply areas in the South East of England. Turbines then produce in excess to local Scottish demand and the grid cannot handle transfer all of that electricity across the country.

   If there was a zonal pricing system, Scottish wind turbines wouldn’t need to be curtailed because the price would reflect regional demand, and higher prices in the South would incentivise more local renewables projects. However, the gas lobby makes too much money from the balancing market for this to happen.

4. A brief thought on critical thinking…

   This is **exactly the kind of post** where people should really hold off making up their mind on something before hearing both sides of the story.

   This headline sounds like a terrible situation – a billion pounds literally **wasted**. But hold on, what’s the source of this “news”? A website called “wastedwind.energy”. That sounds *just a little bit* like it might be run by someone with an agenda to push.

   Now, I don’t know the full story and the full complexities, but I do know that gas plants can’t just turn on and off at the drop of a hat. I also know that the amount of electricity being fed into the grid needs to match the demand for energy. Therefore, I can at the very least hypothesise that we might just be paying wind farms to turn off at certain times because **that’s a thing they can do** and modelling of the weather patterns/demand cycle suggests that turning off gas power instead would cause more problems.

   I might be completely wrong about all of this. But I’m **definitely not going to have a strong opinion** when all I’ve heard is one openly agenda-driven website pushing a clickbaity headline.

5. That why we need more batteries capacity yet so much uninformed people are against it
   Tho i am hoping vehicle to grid will become more common

6. What versus having to spend £20 billion on having additional capacity? Sounds like a good saving to me.

7. There were ideas floated many years ago to setup cryptocurrency mining for exactly this situation, as you can dynamically adjust your mining effort to absorb excess wind energy and make the government money at the same time. AI infrastructure will probably end up filling that gap, but we lost a lot of money because many greens didn’t understand how crypto can help invest in renewables.

8. As the UK GDP is around £3 trillion saying that we have wasted £1.1 trillion on switching to gas plants doesn’t seem possible.

9. I wonder which fossil fuel company is paying for that website?

10. I watched a recent triggernometry video on Net Zero, and it sounds like we have a bunch of idiots in charge of power who make us all pay a fortune when it shouldn’t be necessary

11. That’s an insane figure. Is gross incompetence not a thing anymore? 

    I know politicians are useless and line their pockets, but it just seems to inept to pay billions into not solving the problem we need to, whilst being wasteful, profiting the fossil fuel owners – who have harmed/profited off of us, and being as un environmentally friendly as possible, by wasting green free electric (the infrastructure of which is literally already there and paid for, with no reduction and likely increase in running costs by switching it off) in favour of the more polluting expensive kind.

    Literally burning our money to burn gas

12. The privatized electricity companies failed to invest in a better grid, because more focus on dividend payments to their shareholders. Hence , this “lost “ electricity .

13. Shit that could have paid my electric bill for a whole year.

14. About £2.50/month per household. Not insane, but not nothing either

    To be fair, I think there’s some inevitability in this – we do actually need gas “peaker” plants (at least for now)… so one way or another we’re going to end up subsidising their higher operating costs. That’s just the price we pay for the fact we NEED the flexibility they provide. Effectively you can think of it as us paying for the service (grid balancing), as well as the power itself

    I’m very much pro-green-energy, but this headline makes it sound like it’s money that’s being thrown away. It kinda is, but realistically we can’t afford for those plants to close – so all that would happen otherwise is that we’d pay them £1.1bn some other way in order to keep them open

    I do think it’s silly to waste available green power though – I’d rather not burn the gas unnecessarily. If we have to pay them £1.1bn to keep them running, let’s just hand them the cash rather than shutting off wind turbines when the energy is available

15. Octopus give out free energy sessions when the green energy is high. Then they put up prices, because the wholesale price is going up.

    Now I’m finding out £1bn has been wasted.. This is the shit that people need to be protesting and getting angry about.

16. Area man wastes petrol by braking for junction.  More at 7.

17. This should be seen as a stunning success for energy generation but a huge failure in storage and network transmission?

18. A severe lack of power systems engineering knowledge in this thread. It is not as simple as pricing. It is to do with grid network capacity, and inability to transport power long distances due to physics. The only way to resolve this is to invest billions in high voltage DC links to connect the renewable sources to the demand. A privatised distributed system is unable to do this. The only way is government action.

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