Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm wasted three-quarters of the energy it produced last year after being paid to switch off its turbines. [some emphasis, links added]
The Seagreen wind farm off Scotland’s east coast is squandering vast amounts of its power because there is not enough grid capacity to transport it to areas of the country where it is needed most.
This inability to handle surplus electricity led to 77pc of Seagreen’s total output going to waste last year, new accounts show, from a total of 114 turbines.
This is likely to have sparked hundreds of millions of pounds in so-called constraint payments for the wind farm, which is run by Scottish energy giant SSE and France’s TotalEnergies.
These payments are made under a government scheme to encourage renewables, aimed at guaranteeing cash for green power even if it cannot be used.
SSE, which is the lead partner in the Seagreen wind farm, refused to disclose how much it was paid for switching off the turbines.
However, estimates from the Renewable Energy Foundation suggest it could amount to more than £200m for the year.
Constraint payments relating to wasted wind are added to consumer and business energy bills in the form of network charges.
Overall, they totalled around £1.7bn last year and are set to reach £8bn by 2030.
Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, blamed Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, for overseeing a system that is becoming unaffordable.
“What other sector do we pay people not to produce anything? We’re spending £1bn switching wind farms off today, but thanks to Ed Miliband’s mad dash for renewables, we’ll be spending £8bn by 2030,” she said.
“We simply cannot afford an approach that makes our energy system higher cost and less productive. Cheap, reliable energy must come first.”
Seagreen became operational in October 2022 with 114 turbines having a theoretical capacity of one gigawatt, although fluctuating wind power means effective capacity is less than half this figure.
Read rest at The Telegraph
It was a massive mistake to allow subsidised and mandated wind power to connect to the grid. Paul Burgess explains that its all about still winds and the failure of the official meteorologists to issue wind drought warnings.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-180089713
Failing to check the wind supply has enabled the worst peacetime public policy on record, countless trillions spent on net zero programmes around the western world to get in return: more expensive electricity; blackouts looming in Germany, Britain and Australia; incalculable damage to the environment through the production chain from mining in the third world to disposal of an impending tsunami of toxic waste.
The wind industry must be the only enterprise that ever survived without caring about the reliability of the supply chain for the major input.
The combination of wind droughts and the cost of grid-scale storage guarantees that there will never be a transition to wind and solar because these “unreliables” are not fit for purpose to power a post-industrial society.
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-sinister-threat-of-wind-droughts
Why did nobody take any notice of the Dunkelflautes observed for years on the North Sea oil and gas rigs? And Britain and Germany bet the farm on wind, especially offshore wind!
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-curious-tale-of-the-north-sea-winds/
The Australian pioneer wind watchers sounded an alarm but not even the Australian authorities and journalists took any notice.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/rafe-champions-work-on-wind-droughts-3b8
And not to mention creating a eyesore and harming the Sea and Shorebirds as well as the Whales