Electricity ratepayers in Britain will be stuck with as much as £2.5 billion a year in extra costs from intermittent shutdowns of the country’s wind farms over the next few years – shutdowns required because the windmills work too well and the National Grid Electricity System Operator’s grid can’t handle the power load they generate on the windiest days, Sky News reports.
“It’s a huge risk. We’re wasting power instead of exporting it or using it and this is really cheap power that we’re wasting. And I would also say as an investment signal, it’s not great. If you think about a developer that wants to build wind farms in the UK, they know that it’s not easy to connect to the transmission system, they know there’s not enough capacity,” said renewable industry group RenewableUK policy director Ana Musat, which is a solid enough take, but we would’ve liked it even better if she characterized the problem as a “cancer” on the British electrical grid.