Wind Farms
The UK’s Viking flagship wind farm has already been paid nearly £2.5m to keep turbines switched off”
The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) figures show 62 per cent of Viking’s output has already had to be discarded in its first month……
The Viking flagship wind farm has already been paid close to £2.5 million to keep its turbines switched off.
The Energy Department, praised the Viking wind farm in the Shetlands, which officially opened on Thursday, saying “hundreds of thousands of homes” across the country would benefit from “cheap, home-grown energy”.
They said the development, the UK’s largest onshore wind farm, “shows why we need more developments like this to make Britain a clean energy superpower”.
The wind farm has so far been paid £2.48 million by the National Grid to reduce its energy output, according to the REF analysis.
The payouts, which will ultimately be added to consumer bills, have been made almost every day this month and have varied between £227,192 and £8,408 per day.
The Viking wind farm would mean hundreds of thousands of homes benefiting from ‘cheap, home-grown energy’, said the Government.
Known as constraint payments, they are paid out by the National Grid to incentivise wind farms to reduce output.
The value of constraint payments to wind farms has increased rapidly in recent years as more of Britain’s power has come from renewable sources. Last year, wind farms were paid over £310 million to stop producing energy, up from £174,000 in 2010, according to REF data.
The charity’s analysis found that £1.8 billion had been spent since constraint payments began in 2010, which had ultimately been passed on to consumers’ electricity bills.
The Renewable Energy Foundation said: “The paradoxical outcome is that wind farm developers actually make more money when they are paid to reduce output rather than when they are selling normally on the market. The British consumer is being ripped off, and developers are laughing all the way to the bank.
“All you hear from the Department of Energy is that more renewable energy will make energy cheap – but unless they deal with the constraint payment programme, that is simply an illusion.”
The Renewable Energy Foundation however, said it would “certainly not save people money on their electricity bill” if wind farms continued to be paid huge sums of money to keep turbines off…
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