Why Britain Switches Off Its Wind Farms
Part one of a weekly series taking the UK's energy subsidies apart, one scheme at a time, using the Subsidy Clock. We begin with the strangest of them: the money we pay wind farms to stop generating.
A few weeks ago I switched on the Subsidy Clock: a single, live figure for what the energy transition has cost us, every pound traced back to an official source. But a total is only as useful as our grasp of what sits behind it — and the Clock is built from a dozen separate schemes and charges, most of them designed to be hard to follow. So over the coming weeks I’m going to take them apart, one at a time: what each one is, how it reaches your wallet, and what it comes to. By the end you will understand the UK’s renewable-subsidy system better than most of the people who champion it. And then, in September, my book puts the whole picture in one place.
ELECTRICITY IS NOT like water in a tank. You cannot store it at anything like the scale a country runs on, and the grid has to balance — supply exactly meeting demand — every second of every day. That physical fact is why Britain spends more than a billion pounds a year switching off wind farms and burning gas instead.
Here is how it happens. Much of our wind — and nearly all of the wind that gets switched off — sits where the wind is: Scotland, and the seas around it. Most of the demand is four hundred miles south. The cables in between were built for a country whose power stations sat near its cities, and there are only so many electrons they can carry at once. On a windy day the turbines in the north generate more than the wires can move south. Something has to give — and because you cannot store the surplus, and cannot force it down a full cable, what gives is the wind. The grid operator instructs the turbines to shut down.
The industry term for this is a ‘constraint payment’, and it repays taking literally. It is money paid to the owner of a wind farm on the condition that the wind farm produces nothing. The turbines are turning, the wind is free, and we pay for it not to arrive. Then, because the south still needs power, we pay a gas plant to fire up and cover the gap.
Three payments, then, for one unit of electricity: we pay to build the wind farm, we pay it to switch off, and we pay gas to replace it. The wind was blowing the whole time.
None of this is hidden, exactly. It is simply never added up in one place. The Subsidy Clock keeps a live count of the middle payment — the money handed to wind farms to stop. It stands at £2.8 billion since 2010, in today's money, and is running now at about £335 million a year. Since November 2025 alone, more than seven and a half million megawatt-hours have been paid for and never made — electricity we bought and threw away.
And it grows — not in spite of building more wind, but because of it. Nearly all of that £2.8 billion is recent: the entire 2010s cost about £650 million.1 Switching the wind off, though, is only half of it. In 2025 the switch-off payments came to around £380 million; add the gas burned to replace the wind we discarded, and the whole exercise cost about £1.46 billion, up from £1.23 billion the year before.2 On current trends, the grid operator expects the wider balancing bill to head toward £8 billion a year by 2030.3
This is the argument at the centre of The Energy Trap. A wind turbine is cheap to build and expensive to fit into a real, physical grid, and the second cost is the one that never reaches the headline. The transition is not failing at the turbine. It is failing at the wire.
The wind kept blowing all last year, and we paid more than a billion pounds not to use it. The meter is running — go and watch it.
The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can is published by Swift Press in September.
If you know of someone would benefit from this tutorial series on the UK Direct and Indirect Renewable Subsidy Schemes, please consider forwarding the essay to them and inviting them to subscribe.
Footnotes
Wind constraint (turn-down) payments totalled about £649 million across 2010–2019, against roughly £350–400 million in each of the last few years — the cost is heavily concentrated in the recent period. Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘A Decade of Constraint Payments’; REF, ‘Discarded wind energy increases by 91% in 2024’. ↩
The 2025 total — around £1.46 billion, up from about £1.23 billion in 2024 — combines the payments to switch wind down (~£380m in 2025) with the cost of replacement generation, mostly gas (~£1.08bn). Calendar-year figures from Octopus Energy’s ‘Wasted Wind’ tracker as reported by The Times and compiled by Tim Harper. NESO’s own balancing-cost reports use fiscal years and a wider scope, so are not directly comparable. ↩
NESO’s 2025 Annual Balancing Costs Report projects that the total cost of balancing the system could reach around £8 billion a year by 2030 without accelerated grid upgrades. NESO Annual Balancing Costs Report 2025; pv magazine. ↩
You couldn't make this up 🤦♂️
Iron Law of Infrastructure: Support infrastructure must be insstalled and operational before its support is required.
That concept is hardly brain science or rocket surgery. ;-)