UK wind power constraint payments cost £920 million in 2023 – and rising

Whitelee wind farm, Scotland [image credit: Bjmullan / Wikipedia]

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Analysts from an energy storage specialist say £920 million annual cost of ‘curtailment’ could be cut 80% by using existing technologies like battery storage more effectively. But that would obviously require a lot of expensive batteries, and gas power stations could easily do the job on a much more extensive scale. Such is the state of the UK electricity grid thanks to net zero climate obsessions and intermittent wind power dotted all over the place, especially in areas remote from population centres – i.e. the opposite of where that power is most needed.
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Grid capacity constraints added nearly £1 billion of ‘curtailment’ costs to electricity bills for homes and businesses in 2023 as abundant energy from wind farms was unable to be transmitted to areas of demand, says Field Energy.

The majority of this cost was down to a single pinch point in the UK’s electricity grid on the Scottish/English border called the B6 boundary.

Analysis by energy storage developer and operator Field estimates this boundary alone could cause up to £2.2 billion of curtailment costs by 2030 as the UK’s curtailment problem escalates. Overall UK curtailment costs could reach £3.5 billion by that date.

Nearly three quarters of the UK’s total curtailment cost in 2023 came from paying gas power plants in England and Wales to fire up, as capacity constraints on the grid meant cheaper, abundant wind power from Scotland couldn’t be exported south when required.

Field’s analysis also reveals that wind farms in Scotland are being curtailed 40% of the time, while transmission capacity across key boundaries in the UK, including the B6 boundary, rarely has more than a 50% utilisation rate, further restricting the flow of electricity.
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To address the specific curtailment problem caused by the B6 boundary on the Scottish/English border, building 10GW of energy storage in key locations across the UK would reduce the estimated £2.2 billion curtailment costs by nearly 90%, Field’s analysis suggests.

Full article here.
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Image: Whitelee wind farm, Scotland [credit: Bjmullan / Wikipedia]