So far in 2025, Britain has wasted £870m switching off wind turbines and paying gas plants to switch on because the energy cannot be efficiently distributed over the National Grid.

The website Wasted Wind, run by Robin Hawkes who works at Octopus Energy, gives a daily figure for the money wasted by switching off wind turbines and the, much higher, figure for buying energy elsewhere.

The central problem is that when it really is windy, the Grid near wind turbines reaches capacity, and the turbines turned down (called curtailment), yet payment is still made for the generation whilst alternative energy sources (usually fossil fuels) are fired up and paid for. A sort of double whammy.

Hawkes supports zonal pricing as a solution, something the Government recently rejected as part of the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA). Octopus backed zonal pricing citing independent analysis that it would save upward of £3.7bn on energy bills every year and cut system carbon emissions by 17 per cent.

The problem is that Government targets for renewable generation mean that until the Grid is expanded and connections speeded up there is likely to be more wasted energy, with the National Energy System Operator (Neso) predicting costs of around £8bn per year by 2030.

So, why was zonal pricing rejected? In part it was probably political, as who would like to be at the dispatch box defending why one factory in Scotland can have cheaper energy whilst one in Bucks can’t? In part it is also in the nature of the beast that any uncertainty of what you might or might not be paid will deter investment in new renewables.

And whilst the political wind blows so do the turbines.

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