‘If the National Grid can’t cope it should be made to’

Power: Councillor calls for speedier expansion after £3.1m payout

A north politician has urged critics to “kick the grid, not the wind farmers” over vast penalties regularly incurred by electricity customers.

His call follows a record payout of £3.1million to power companies for a single day earlier this month.

The cost, to be met by customers, was compensation for switching off turbines to avoid overloading the National Grid.

Sutherland SNP councillor Graham Phillips, inset, has called on governments on both sides of the border to speed up the expansion of the grid to tackle the problem.

He accepted that projects were underway to upgrade the transmission line from Dounreay to Beauly, but said more haste was needed.

He claimed a lack of devolved powers meant there was nothing the Scottish Government could do to pre-empt the problem.

“Kick the grid, not the wind farmers,” councillor Phillips said. “The people who run the National Grid have been dragging their feet.

“If the grid can’t cope it should be made to.

“I have every sympathy for customers who are being overcharged rotten in Scotland, charged more per unit than anywhere else in the UK, partly because of grid charges.”

Mr Phillips is equally angry about the discrepancy in charges applied north and south of the border to grid connections.

He said: “The National Grid must change its charging structure because you can be charged £22 per megawatt hour to connect from up here, while if you build a power station in London the grid pays you to do it.

“It discriminates against regional generators and there’s an assumption that electricity generated in Scotland is not consumed in Scotland.”

A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: “A major programme of grid investment worth billions of pounds has been underway in Scotland for several years. “As older power stations close and release capacity and £7billion of major upgrades are completed, it is expected the level of constraint payments will reduce.” A spokesman for the National Grid said: “Transmission charging is designed to reflect the cost of getting electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s needed.

“This means electricity generators located far away from densely populated areas pay a charge based on the fact that their energy is being transported through more of the transmission system.

“Similarly, electricity suppliers who have customers in areas with lots of generation pay lower charges.”

Graham Phillips