Although windfarms account for only 4% of total constraint payments, it is only wind turbines that hit the headlines for getting 'paid to do nothing'. Utility Week's Megan Darby finds out why.
Outraged headlines about windfarms being paid to stop generating come around more frequently than turbine blades in a gale.
"Power grid can't cope when the wind blows," blustered a typical piece from The Times in August. "Windfarms paid £30 million a year to stand idle because the grid can't cope with all the energy they produce," was the Mail Online's offering a couple of weeks earlier.
The contention of such articles is that wind is a rip-off. It is certainly counter-intuitive to pay not to use a product.
However, National Grid will tell anyone who cares to listen that constraint payments are a standard tool to balance the system and make up less than 1 per cent of the bill.
Wind is not even the main beneficiary: in 2012/13, just 4 per cent of the payments went to windfarms, with the rest going to conventional generators. The total cost of constraints was £170 million, of which a mere £7.6 million went to windfarms. The average price paid to wind developers is coming down - at £113/MWh nearly a third lower than in the previous year. Admittedly this is higher than the price paid to conventional plants, which avoid fuel costs and do not require compensation for lost subsidies, but it is still a fraction of the overall costs. So why does this keep cropping up as an anti-wind tale?
Read on and you find the same source for all of these stories: the confusingly named Renewable Energy Foundation (REF). A registered charity that boasted TV presenter and anti-wind campaigner Noel Edmonds as its founding chairman, the REF's motives seem to be centred on attacking wind. Its blurb states it is "promoting sustainable development for the benefit of the public by means of energy conservation and the use of renewable energy". However, the occasional supportive noises towards small-scale hydro and biomass aside, its output is dominated by criticism of wind power and green energy costs.
The Guardian reported in May 2011: "Some prominent voices within the industry have long felt that the charity is little more than a front for anti-wind lobbyists." An REF spokeswoman at the time insisted "it's unfair to say that we're anti-wind" and that it researches a range of renewables topics.
The REF publishes a dataset on constraint payments to wind generators, but does not provide equivalent figures for conventional power stations. This is a gift that keeps on giving to journalists at titles with an apparent anti-wind bent.
John Constable, director of the REF, strenuously denies that the organisation's data is selective. "The compensation for lost income for wind is way in excess of what is reasonable," he argues. He welcomes the recent reduction in the average price paid to wind, but says it is "still too high" and Ofgem should intervene.
Having noted windfarm payments are only a small part of the picture, the evidence is they are rising. In August, the REF's data shows windfarm operators reaped £7.7 million - more than in the entire 2012/13 financial year - in compensation for 91GWh they could not sell on the market.
Some of that spike can be attributed to the network struggling to keep up with a fast-growing renewable sector in Scotland. PwC head of regulation, Stuart Cook, says government decided to allow generators to connect before the network was reinforced rather than imperil carbon targets. "Is this a rip-off? It sits uncomfortably paying for nothing, but if this was the cost for early connection of low-carbon generation, it's probably fine. And the constraints costs have been a lot lower than some of the more pessimistic projections."
Industry body Scottish Renewables argues that the way to reduce constraint costs is to increase investment in grid infrastructure and electricity storage. Joss Blamire, senior policy manager, says: "Constraint payments are an essential part of meeting electricity supply and demand and for the Renewable Energy Foundation to only focus in isolation on wind power is meaningless."
Given that sections of the media consistently fail to apply the same scepticism to the REF's agenda as they do to wind power's merits, it seems only a matter of time before the story comes around again.
Reproduced with kind permission from Utility Week.
Source: Utility Week http://www.utilityweek.co.uk