There was a story doing the rounds a week or so ago about how much windfarms were receiving to switch themselves off. The levels of these "constraint payments" has now apparently reached £8.7m in a single month.
When the story appeared in the Times (£), there was a response in the Guardian which noted that constraint payments to windfarms are dwarfed by those to conventional generators.
National Grid made special payments of £300m over the last 12 months to big energy companies – sometimes for switching off their power stations in an attempt to "balance" the system.
The huge payout dwarfs the £37m paid to windfarms to remain offline over the same period to the end of February – a figure used by critics to question the advisability of supporting renewable energy.
The wording is interesting -big generators are paid, "sometimes for switching off".
Clarification comes in the form of a blog post at the Renewable Energy Foundation blog which explains that conventional generators are usually being paid to switch on when they have planned to be switched off (for example for maintenance), or compensating them for fast startups. And the need for conventional plant to make fast startups is, of course, to compensate for the fluctuating output of all those windfarms on the grid.
And we should not forget that the compensation received by the windfarms exceeds even the bloated subsidies that they have lost by not generating any power.
The technical term for this is "a racket".