The UK Energy Minister is Michael Fallon and he has been exposed of having dual standards and being hypocritical unfairly in laying into the wind power industry over the payments it receives to help balance the grid. Let me explain…
Fallon last week wrote to chief executives of RenewableUK, EnergyUK, Scottish Renewables and the Renewable Energy Association, threatening to crack down on smaller wind farms which he accuses of charging too much for curtailing their output. This happens when demand on the grid is too high and the UK National Grid asks operators to provide offers on how much it will cost them to switch off in order to balance demand. In his letter, Fallon said some smaller wind farms, which are usually exempt from requiring a generation licence, were providing bids to switch off that were, in his words “substantially higher than the average”.
The letter continued:
“The government stands ready, if necessary, to look closely at exemptions given by the Secretary of State to individual generating stations and the possibility of exercising his revocation powers in respect of individual generators”.
However it emerged that gas plants were paid £16m last month – five times more than wind – for the same service!
A spokeswoman for the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) told the publication BusinessGreen that the same letter had been sent to each of the trade bodies in a bid to “positively recognise” the efforts of many exempt generators “and to encourage the handful of operators with significantly higher bids than others to do what they can to bring costs down”.
But many in the wind industry see this is a hypocritical move by Fallon to snipe at the wind industry in a cheap bid to gain favour at a time when balancing payments have been focused on by the opponents of renewable energy who are trumping up a storm-in-a-teacup “scandal” of paying wind farms millions of pounds not to generate power. It’s all about Fallon carrying Prime Minister David Cameron’s latest tough on wind line to please Tory back-benchers and middle-England voters. In other word this is a political move, not one rooted in unbiased facts and reasonableness. Why didn’t Fallon’s letter criticise the significantly higher payments given to the gas industry? Most of the constraint payments are handed to fossil fuel generators.
Figures published by the UK National Grid this week reveal that while the wind industry received £3.6m for switching off, the gas industry was paid £19.6m for turning on supply when demand was low. While the gas industry provides a greater share of the UK’s overall power, the figures demonstrate that wind is not the sole recipient of constraint payments. And wind constraints are said to only account for around five percent of the total cost of balancing the grid, closely mirroring the share of power actually provided by wind to the grid.
However, some in the wind industry fear that anti-wind farm campaigners could now try to twist the new data to suggest the increase need for gas payments was due to a drop in wind power output.
Maf Smith, deputy chief executive of RenewableUK, welcomed the new National Grid figures as they provide a bigger picture of how constraint payments are shared. His statement is here:
“All generators are called on to ramp production up or down at short notice depending on National Grid’s needs, normally due to congestion at one or more points in the transmission network. These will be ironed out as the grid is being upgraded. This will help to scotch a few myths as some have tried to focus the issue of constraint and balancing costs entirely on wind rather than looking at all technologies.
“These new figures provide welcome clarity on this complex issue. These short-term balancing adjustments are just a small part of the thousands of actions National Grid performs every day to keep the lights on – overall, wind constraints only account for around five percent of the total cost of balancing the grid.”
Some plain-speaking honesty by Michael Fallon wouldn’t go amiss here.
