Cost of balancing Great Britain’s power grid reaches nearly £50m a day
News Source
•Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:55:52 GMT
📰 What Happened
The cost of balancing Great Britain's power grid reached nearly £50 million in a single day. The grid operator paid £47.9 million on Wednesday to switch windfarms off in areas with too much electricity and turn gas plants on in areas short of power. Windfarms and hydropower plants with about 9 gigawatts of capacity were paid not to generate, enough to supply more than 8 million homes.
🔍 The Backstory
The root of the problem is that the high-voltage cables linking Scotland, where a lot of wind power is generated, to southern England, where demand is growing, are not big enough. So windfarms in the north are paid to stop, and gas plants in the south are paid to start.
These costs are added to household energy bills. They reached a record £505 million in September alone and are expected to total £3.2 billion over the next year. The operator also had to ask France for emergency power twice in one week. Britain's £150 billion network upgrade is not keeping up.
🎯 Why It Matters
Every payment to switch plants on and off ends up on household energy bills, which are already rising. Building new power cables faster could roughly halve these costs, which is why the delay is expensive for ordinary families. Until the cables are built, the country will keep paying for wind power it cannot use.
The cost of balancing Great Britain's power grid reached nearly £50 million in a single day. The grid operator paid £47.9 million on Wednesday to switch windfarms off in areas with too much electricity and turn gas plants on in areas short of power. Windfarms and hydropower plants with about 9 gigawatts of capacity were paid not to generate, enough to supply more than 8 million homes.
The root of the problem is that the high-voltage cables linking Scotland, where a lot of wind power is generated, to southern England, where demand is growing, are not big enough. So windfarms in the north are paid to stop, and gas plants in the south are paid to start.
These costs are added to household energy bills. They reached a record £505 million in September alone and are expected to total £3.2 billion over the next year. The operator also had to ask France for emergency power twice in one week. Britain's £150 billion network upgrade is not keeping up.
Every payment to switch plants on and off ends up on household energy bills, which are already rising. Building new power cables faster could roughly halve these costs, which is why the delay is expensive for ordinary families. Until the cables are built, the country will keep paying for wind power it cannot use.