How to make money doing nothing
Jan 8, 2014
Bishop Hill in Energy: wind

The Times has a big front-page splash on windfarms today. I haven't seen the full story, but the headline is: "Windfarms will be paid billions to switch off".

That should set the cat among the pigeons.

In related news, the Telegraph has been reporting that factories will be paid to operate at night so as to use energy from windfarms.

Update on Jan 8, 2014 by Registered CommenterBishop Hill

I've now located the underlying report that the Times has reported. Here's an excerpt:

On the basis of the NG figures, which show that 13 projects with a connected capacity of 600MW* generated £17m of constraint payments in the three months ending 30th June 2013, what total value of constraint payments can we expect from a contracted connection of 36.5GW on average five years#ahead of the system being capable of transmission? A simplistic calculation is (36,500MW/600MW) x £17m x 20 quarters = £20,700,000,000 (£20.7bn). There is not, so far, any other calculation to dispute this.

That’s TWENTY POINT SEVEN BILLION POUNDS.

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