Waste In The Wind: Green Subsidies Fleecing UK Electricity Customers

Why do bad things keep happening to customers of alternative energy?

The obvious answer is that producing power with only wind or the sun is not efficient.

But the fleecing of electricity customers is getting increasingly creative, even in a market that’s been hailed as a model for the future of green power. [emphasis, links added]

As alternative energy’s era of reality checks continues to unfold, it turns out that some customers have been forced to write much larger checks than expected.

In the windy United Kingdom, it may have seemed that a future beyond fossil fuels had already started to arrive. Anmar Frangoul reported for CNBC last year:

Wind power was Britain’s biggest source of electricity in the first quarter of 2023, overtaking natural gas and highlighting the increasingly important role renewables are set to play in the years ahead.

According to researchers at Imperial College London, wind turbines provided 32.4% of Britain’s electricity in the first three months of the year. Gas, a fossil fuel, was responsible for 31.7% of the electricity fuel mix.

Many other media folk joined the celebration.

Now comes news of the hangover, and unfortunately the pain is borne by average citizens.

Gavin Finch, Todd Gillespie, Eric Fan, Jason Grotto, and Sam Dodge reported last week for Bloomberg:

Dozens of British wind farms run by some of Europe’s largest energy companies have routinely overestimated how much power they’ll produce, adding millions of pounds a year to consumers’ electricity bills, according to market records and interviews with power traders.

These extra costs are linked to a growing problem with Britain’s outdated electricity network: On blustery days, too much wind power risks overloading the system, and the grid operator must respond by paying some firms not to generate. This “curtailment” costs consumers hundreds of millions of pounds each year.

Adding to that expense, some wind farm operators exaggerate how much energy they say they intend to produce, which boosts the payments they receive for turning off, according to nine people — traders, academics and market experts — most of whom agreed to discuss this controversial behavior only on condition of anonymity.

In effect, they said, the grid has paid some wind farms not to generate power that they wouldn’t have produced anyway.

One might reasonably ask: if a policy is crazy enough to pay people for not supplying a commodity, why should a non-supplier not charge for the largest possible volume of nothing?

In any case, the British regulator called Ofgem now claims that it’s on the case. Emma Powell reports for the Times of London:

The energy watchdog is investigating claims that wind farm operators have overestimated the amount of energy they are set to generate, saddling customers with millions of pounds in extra costs…

A spokesman for Ofgem said: “Ofgem is investigating the alleged behaviour and has already asked the Energy System Operator to look into this.

How about looking into the behavior of politicians around the world who have been selling expensive political fantasies about wind energy for decades?

Read rest at WSJ