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. As for the Saudi comment, we’ve got a long way to go: as things stand Britain ranks only sixth in the world for installed wind power capacity, behind China, the US, Germany, India and Spain.

The comparison is also inapt because Saudi Arabia doesn’t routinely pour its oil down the drain for want of tanks to store it or tankers to take it away. That is what we are doing with wind energy. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, 3.7 TWh of wind energy in 2020 — enough to power every home in Wales for the whole year — was wasted because the national grid could not accept it. Wind farm owners were paid a total of £274 million in ‘constraint payments’ to turn off their turbines — which was passed on to consumers’ bills.

The problem is exacerbated because over-generous constraint payments have given wind-farm operators a perverse incentive to build in places where there is little demand for electricity: they get paid more when they are not generating electricity than when they are.