Why Are Green Activists Suddenly Outraged at the Billions Wasted Paying Wind Farms to Switch Off When it's Too Windy?

The hypocrisy and chutzpah beggars belief

There are two related, emergent trends in green politics at the moment. The first is that, in the face of rapid geopolitical shifts, the global green agenda is weakening, perhaps terminally. Second, the UK’s green agenda is facing a reckoning also, as it becomes obvious that the costs are overwhelming the budgets of households and businesses, leaving the Government’s promises of 'lower bills' a distant and painful memory. These two trends meet in a somewhat clumsy attempt to counter them in Monday’s edition of the Independent newspaper-turned-website this week.

It is the headline that strikes us first: 'Households hit with higher bills in £1bn wind farm "racket".' The story here has a ring of truth about it – a half truth. The "racket" in question is the fact that wind farms are given 'constraint payments' to stop producing power when either there is insufficient demand or the grid lacks the capacity to move the power from where it is being made to where it might be needed. “The National Energy System Operator (Neso) pays wind farms for the amount of energy they would have created when off they have to shut down, and then has to shell out on alternative energy sources, such as from gas-powered stations, to fill the gap on the national network," explains the Independent.