Why the UK can’t rely on renewables…yet

Like a football tournament with an official beer, COP26 had an official energy provider: the Griffin wind farm in Perthshire, operated by SSE. Trouble is that for much of the conference it was not paid to generate electricity. Instead, it received £500,000 in ‘constraint payments’, which are given to owners of wind farms when they are generating too much electricity for the grid to absorb. The payments expose a huge hole in Britain’s renewables-heavy energy policy: we have little means of storing energy when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining so that we can use it on dull, windless days.

In eight years, Boris Johnson has gone from telling us that wind turbines ‘couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’ to boasting that Britain is going to become ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’. He is wrong on both counts. Give a wind turbine a strong sou’wester and it could pull the roof off the entire Ambrosia factory.