£104,000 a day is what you pay as wind farms lie idle

sCoTLAnD’s wind farm operators are raking in more than £100,000 day as part of a ‘perverse incentive’ to switch off turbines when it is too windy, new research has revealed. The amount of money paid to wind farms to stand idle has risen by £53million over the past year, according to recently published figures.

In exceptionally windy conditions, the national Grid cannot cope with the extra energy produced by the turbines so it makes ‘constraint payments’ to operators when they have to close wind farms temporarily.

According to research published by the Renewable energy Foundation, constraint payments bankrolled through domestic and corporate energy bills topped £69million in 2016, with £18million paid out already this year.

Between the beginning of 2010 and last month, the national Grid paid out more than £277million to scottish wind farm operators, giving an average subsidy of £104,000 a day.

The payment for not producing power is negotiated between individual energy producers and the national Grid, with the subsidies then added to electricity bills paid by consumers.

The figures emerged just days after concerns were raised over a radical change in planning policy which could open the door for hundreds more turbines to be erected across the country.

A 2006 map detailing areas where turbines would or would not be acceptable has been radically redrawn. Large red areas where there was a ‘presumption against development’ have shrunk to a few pockets of land around the west and north coasts.

The staggering levels of subsidy propping up the scottish renewables industry has cast serious doubts on the viability of wind power.

Renewable energy Foundation spokesman Dr Lee moroney said: ‘The excessive payments to wind farms not to generate have created a perverse incentive encouraging developers to locate their wind farms in places where there is little electricity demand and the grid is weak.

‘This increases the wind farm’s average income per unit generated and increases system costs that are then passed on to consumers. This is plain wrong.’

The figures show that between January 1 and April 12 this year, the giant Whitelee Wind Farm in east Renfrewshire raked in £3.9million in constraint payments. It is operated by scottishPower Renewables, a subsidiary of the spanish energy giant Iberdrola which made a profit of £2.3billion last year.

It is now more than five years since Alex salmond predicted scotland would be ‘the green energy powerhouse of europe’.

But while the total capacity of scotland’s wind farms grew by 8 per cent from 5,393 to 5,832 megawatts last year, the amount of electricity generated actually fell by 4 per cent from 12,932 to 12,429 gigawatt hours.

scottish Conservative energy spokesman Alexander Burnett said: ‘This ridiculous situation underlines one of the many problems with relying on onshore wind. It’s more evidence of the damage caused by the snP’s narrow-minded obsession with wind power.’

A national Grid spokesman insisted constraint payments are ‘the most economically efficient’ way of managing the UK’s energy supply. A scottish Government spokesman added: ‘Constraint payments are an essential feature of the operation of the grid.’

‘SNP’s obsession with wind power’