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

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

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    12 Comments

    1. EarnestHolly on

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

    2. Dedsnotdead on

      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. g1umo on

      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. Vernacian on

      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. Extra-Fig-7425 on

      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. Jakes_Snake_ on

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

    7. AnalThermometer on

      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. Mba1956 on

      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.

    10. BaBeBaBeBooby on

      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. Aggravating_Band_353 on

      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. Spudsmad on

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