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Wasted Wind, Higher Bills

Why are we paying wind farms to switch off — and paying for it on our bills?

On windy days, Scotland's wind farms are paid to switch off because the grid can't move the power to where it's needed — and we all pay for it through charges on our energy bills. Clean power is thrown away while people struggle with the cost of electricity. That's wrong twice over.

The scale of the waste (2025)

• Scotland: wind curtailment cost about £343 million in 2025, with more than 10 TWh of clean electricity wasted — Northern Scotland alone around 8.8 TWh.
• Great Britain: total grid-constraint costs reached roughly £1.5 billion — payments to turn wind down, plus the cost of firing up gas to replace it elsewhere.
• These costs are recovered from consumers on energy bills — and they're growing, as renewable power races ahead of the grid upgrades needed to carry it.

It's not the wind farms' fault — it's a grid bottleneck. The turbines work; the wires can't deliver.

Why the cheap power never reaches your bill

Here's the part that stings: even as wind is wasted, your electricity price is set by gas. Britain prices power every half‑hour off the most expensive plant needed — almost always gas ("marginal pricing"). So however much cheap wind is flowing, your bill tracks the gas price — gas set it about two‑thirds of the time in 2026, down from ~90% in 2022. The cheap, clean power exists; the market design stops it reaching you.

Who gains? When gas sets a high price, the cheap generators — wind, solar, nuclear, hydro — get paid that high price too, while their own costs barely moved. Economists call it “inframarginal rent”; in plain terms, windfall profits for generators, higher bills for us. The Government effectively conceded the point by taxing it — an Electricity Generator Levy of 45% on low‑carbon generators' excess revenue (from 2023). You don't tax a windfall you don't believe exists.

And the “green premium” many of us paid? Most “green tariffs” were backed only by cheap certificates (REGOs, ~£1–2 a year) that relabel ordinary power as “green.” Ofgem itself now says there is “not sufficient evidence” they add any environmental benefit, and suppliers such as Good Energy and OVO have dropped them. Households paid extra believing they were funding clean power — often they were buying a badge. It was legal, but widely misleading, and the regulators (the CMA/ASA Green Claims Code, and Ofgem's REGO review) are only now catching up.

So we waste the clean power, price the bills off gas, hand generators a windfall, and charged a premium for certificates — four ways the same broken system costs ordinary people. Every one of them is fixable. See the whole flow as one picture →

The fix is infrastructure — and the prize is cheaper power

Move and store the power instead of wasting it: better transmission, local use (hydrogen, batteries, heat) and smarter distribution. The waste we all pay for could instead be value we all share — a cleaner, more affordable electricity system for the whole community. Our companion idea, Curtailed-Wind Green Hydrogen, shows one concrete way to use the power we're currently binning.

The graphene opportunity — real, British, part-way there

Part of the answer is better conductors that carry more power with less loss — and this is a British strength. Graphene was first isolated at the University of Manchester (a UK discovery, Nobel Prize 2010), and Manchester's National Graphene Institute — the UK's leading centre for the field — now helps lead a multi-million-pound international project on next-generation cable technology for a greener grid, including the HVDC cables needed to carry offshore wind power. Graphene-coated copper is already in commercial specialist cables, and in the lab graphene–copper and graphene–aluminium composites reach roughly double the current-carrying capacity of ordinary copper.

Honest position: the specialist products are here today; grid-scale graphene conductors are maturing but not yet mainstream — and that's exactly the fundable gap. Since the science is British, it's a chance for Britain to lead.

What we're asking for

• Help people understand it — so the waste, and the fix, are widely known.
• Back the research — support backing and accelerating UK research (building on Manchester's work) to bring grid-scale graphene conductors to reality.
• Add your voice — press for grid investment and for using, not wasting, curtailed power.

We keep this evidence-led and non-partisan, within charity campaigning rules — we champion graphene as a fast-emerging technology to accelerate, not a finished fix.

Sources: 2025 Scottish wind-curtailment (~£343m / >10 TWh) and GB grid-constraint (~£1.5bn) cost reporting; graphene research at the University of Manchester / National Graphene Institute (including its international next-generation grid-cable project); graphene-coated copper in commercial specialist cables; graphene–copper composites at roughly twice copper's current-carrying capacity in lab research. Figures indicative, from public reporting, September 2026.