Labour’s wind expansion will be ‘astonishingly wasteful’

Net Zero Watch says that Labour’s plans for a vast expansion of the wind fleet will be highly wasteful. This is because, at times when the wind is blowing strongly, too much power will be produced, and windfarms will be forced to switch off. They will therefore need to earn their income at other times, and will have to increase their prices to cover their costs.

The UK wholesale market is seeing a rapidly rising number of periods of overproduction, and this is thought to be the main reason that offshore windfarms demanded, and received, a 60% price increase in the renewables auctions.

Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:

We have no economic means to store surplus electricity on the necessary scale, so Labour’s plans will simply drive up costs. Millions of megawatt hours of potential production are going to be thrown away. It’s astonishingly wasteful and will add billions of pounds to consumer bills.

Notes for editors

1. Net Zero Watch has estimated that a fourfold expansion of wind power would lead to overproduction of around 30 terawatt hours of electricity each year.

2. Windfarms’ annual costs are almost all incurred regardless of their output, so a reduction in output means a higher price must be charged on each unit. The overproduction that Labour’s expansion of wind power would cause would mean that windfarms would have to switch off much more often. The unit cost of wind power would therefore rise, from around £100 to around £150 per megawatt hour.