Wind Power Is Ready. Why Isn’t the Grid?

Nick

Welcome back to Digest This: Unpacking Our Sustainable Future. I'm Nick, and today's episode is called Power With Nowhere to Go.

Emily Nguyen 4

And I'm Emily. Nick, I'll start with a number from The Times. Reporting on October 5, 2026, they said Britain has spent just over 1.51 billion pounds so far this year switching off wind turbines and paying other plants to switch on. That already beats the 1.47 billion pounds spent in all of last year, according to Wasted Wind, a tracker run by Octopus Energy.

Nick

And September alone was a record 404.3 million pounds. September 30 was the single costliest day, at 30 million pounds. So let's say plainly what curtailment is. A wind farm in a remote part of Scotland can produce power, but the lines between there and the cities are full. The grid operator, the National Energy System Operator, or NESO, has to balance supply and demand in real time. So it pays the wind farm to turn down, and it pays a plant closer to demand to turn up.

Emily Nguyen 4

The Times says 1.28 billion pounds of that went to gas plants near urban areas, which were paid to fire up and replace the wind that couldn't get through. High gas prices tied to the US war on Iran pushed those costs up. And some lines are out for upgrades, so Octopus says some crucial Scottish transmission points are running at only 40 percent of capacity. That's temporary, and it's meant to help in the long run, but right now it makes the bottleneck worse.

Nick

I want to be careful here, because people hear this and say wind doesn't work. That's the wrong reading. Cheap wind got built faster than the wires. That's a timing problem, and it's a good problem compared to the alternative.

Emily Nguyen 4

I agree it's a timing problem, but I'd push harder on how big it gets. The Times reports total constraint costs were about 2.2 billion pounds in the year to June, and NESO forecasts 3.2 billion pounds for the twelve months to July next year. The National Audit Office warned last month the bill could reach 7.8 billion pounds by the end of the decade. That's about 100 pounds on a typical annual energy bill. At that point it's a household cost, not a footnote.

Nick

Fair. And NESO's own projection frames the scale. Its Constraints Collaboration Project page says flows across Scottish boundaries are expected to triple between 2022 and 2030. It estimates associated costs between 500 million pounds and 3 billion pounds annually by 2030. That's a different estimate from the Audit Office's figure, and they measure different things, so I wouldn't stack them together. But they all point the same way.

Emily Nguyen 4

So the question for today is simple. What good is cheap renewable energy if we can't move it, store it, or use it when it's available? And the people trying to answer that don't agree at all.

Nick

Let me take the side of the wires first, because I think they get dismissed too fast. Britain has a 70 billion pounds programme of network upgrades underway. The Times says many projects are running late, but the government's line is that decades of underinvestment created this. You can't build a clean energy system on a grid that was designed around coal plants near cities.

Emily Nguyen 4

I'm not against wires. I'm against assuming the biggest wire is always the right wire. Look at David Newbery's paper in Energy Economics, published October 2026. He finds marginal curtailment is three or more times average curtailment. So the more generation you stack behind one constraint, the faster the wasted share climbs.

Nick

Right, but that argues for more transmission. If the last turbine you add gets curtailed three times as often as the average one, you need more capacity.

Emily Nguyen 4

Not necessarily, and that's his point. He's modelling the efficient trade off between transmission and curtailment. For Scottish wind, he finds overhead lines have little effect on desirable levels of curtailment. But the proposed costly subsea links raise efficient curtailment to the point where most Scottish wind expansion becomes unprofitable.

Nick

Hold on. Unprofitable under what assumption? His highlights say if incremental transmission cost is high, renewable profits may not cover the extra system costs. It's a simplified model, and the author calls it that. It doesn't say Scottish wind is a bad idea. It says the cost of the link matters.

Emily Nguyen 4

Agreed, it's a model and it's conditional. But it should make anyone cautious about treating every large capital project as automatically justified. Some curtailment is economically efficient. Building a cable so a turbine never gets switched off can cost more than the power it saves.

Nick

So where do we land? You accept new wires, just not every wire at any price?

Emily Nguyen 4

Yes, and here's where I think utilities are slow. Ghosh and colleagues, in Energy Conversion and Management: X, September 2026, look at advanced reconductoring, which means upgrading the conductors on existing lines to carry more. They put the cost between 0.18 and 0.88 million dollars per mile for lines from 115 to 765 kilovolts. They describe that as cost effective compared to a full line buildout.

Nick

I like that. But I'd note the paper is US focused, and it's a review, so I wouldn't promise those costs apply to a Scottish corridor. Reconductoring also doesn't create a new route. It squeezes more out of the one you've got.

Emily Nguyen 4

Sure, but squeezing more from an existing corridor is exactly what's needed while the big projects run late. If a faster, cheaper upgrade is available in some places, I'd want to know why it isn't the first question asked.

Nick

Because the regulator and the asset owners are set up around big projects with clear returns. That's my interpretation, not something in the paper. But I'll concede this much. Wires and quick upgrades aren't opposites. We need both, and the sequence matters.

Emily Nguyen 4

Now storage, because this is where I think the debate gets slippery. Regulators like batteries. They're quicker to site, and there's less of the permitting fight you get with a new line.

Nick

And I'm a fan. Holladay and coauthors, in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, September 2026, model this using Texas's ERCOT grid. They find storage and transmission are substitutes when the line is constrained and the battery is charging or discharging. They say that holds even when wind is being curtailed.

Emily Nguyen 4

But read the next sentence. They also say the opportunity cost of substituting storage for transmission is higher system costs and less investment in renewable generation. So you avoid the fight over the line, and the system pays for it later.

Nick

Is that really a fatal flaw? It's a tradeoff. Their model says storage works as transmission where lines are often constrained and the battery rarely sits idle. In the right place, it's a legitimate tool.

Emily Nguyen 4

I didn't say it's useless. I said it can be a band aid if it's chosen only because it's politically easier. My interpretation, and it's only mine, is that a battery moves energy across time while a line moves it across space. If your problem is geographic access, shifting hours may not solve it.

Nick

Fair, though Newbery adds a useful wrinkle. He finds that if local grid connected storage covers most of its cost, storage alongside onshore wind increases profits and allows a small reduction in transmission access. Small. So I'd call it a complement that trims the wire, not a replacement.

Emily Nguyen 4

I'll take that. Now the demand side. Ghosh and colleagues look at shifting data center workloads geographically during high curtailment hours. Across five 25 megawatt data centers, they report average daily savings of $18,150, while soaking up power that would otherwise be wasted.

Nick

That's a formulated and demonstrated result, not a national rollout, so let's not oversell it. But it fits what NESO is doing. Its Constraints Collaboration Project gathered 30 responses from 13 organisations. It's now pursuing Boundary Flow Smoothing, which uses flexible assets to smooth volatility across transmission boundaries, and a Demand for Constraints service to contract flexible demand.

Emily Nguyen 4

Which brings us to pricing. Octopus Energy lobbied for regional wholesale pricing so generators would have to account for grid constraints. The government ruled it out last year. Greg Jackson told The Times that paying to throw away homegrown cheap power is, in his words, madness.

Nick

I'm not sold on zonal pricing. A uniform national price protects consumers and investors from regional lottery effects, and the government's argument is about connections reform and building the grid.

Emily Nguyen 4

But who pays for the mismatch now? Every household, through their bill. If a national price lets a project in a congested spot sell power the grid can't deliver, someone else covers the redispatch. That's a siting signal we're giving up, and I think it matters.

Nick

Or the signal can come from connection rules, flexible demand, and storage placement instead. I don't think we resolve this today. But I'll grant that without some locational signal, flexibility gets harder to justify.

Nick

Let's widen out, because this isn't only a British story. Ghosh and colleagues point out that even in CAISO, often recognized for lower curtailment, curtailments reached 702,883 megawatt hours in April 2023, 839,582 in April 2024, and 919,020 in March 2025. They also note that in vertically integrated markets like the US Midwest, regulation can insulate inflexible coal plants from market signals.

Emily Nguyen 4

And that's the point that keeps this positive. Curtailment is a sign that clean generation is arriving faster than the system around it. The fix is to build the rest of the system, not to slow the wind and solar down.

Nick

Which brings in a piece we haven't touched. Wind and solar follow the weather. Renewable natural gas and biogas can deliver energy when it's actually needed. RNG can be stored, and in appropriate applications it can move through existing gas infrastructure. It can serve industrial heat, transportation, and power generation.

Emily Nguyen 4

And biogas does a second job. It manages organic waste while capturing methane. So a farm, a food processor, a distillery, or a wastewater plant can turn a waste problem into an energy source. To be clear, this doesn't replace wind or solar. It complements them. We probably need renewable electrons and renewable molecules.

Nick

Right, and I'm not declaring a winner. Some energy needs are easy to electrify. Some, like round the clock high temperature heat, are harder. A business should ask itself when it uses energy, what form it actually needs, and how dependent it is on the grid.

Emily Nguyen 4

Add to that: could storage give us flexibility? Do we have organic waste that could become feedstock? And how much does resilience matter to our operation? A wind farm needs transmission. A solar project may benefit from storage. Those projects don't live in isolation.

Nick

So our debate didn't end in agreement, and that's fine. Emily still wants locational pricing and faster upgrades. I still want the big wires built and I'm wary of dropping national pricing. But we agree on the main point. The challenge is no longer simply generating renewable energy.

Emily Nguyen 4

It's delivering the right form of renewable energy, to the right place, at the right time. Wires, batteries, flexible demand, wind, solar, biogas, and RNG each cover a gap the others leave open.

Nick

Thanks for listening to Digest This: Unpacking Our Sustainable Future. Sources for today's episode, including The Times, NESO, and the studies we mentioned, are in the episode notes.

Emily Nguyen 4

Until next time, keep digesting.