Scotland’s Biggest Windfarm Wasted 77% Of Electricity Produced In 2025
Last week, The Telegraph reported that the Seagreen windfarm off Scotland’s east coast was only able to add 23 percent of the electricity it produced into the national grid last year
The Telegraph article reads:
Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm wasted three quarters of the energy it produced last year after being paid to switch off its turbines.
The Seagreen wind farm off Scotland’s east coast is squandering vast amounts of its power because there is not enough grid capacity to transport it to areas of the country where it is needed most.
This inability to handle surplus electricity led to 77pc of Seagreen’s total output going to waste last year, new accounts show, from a total of 114 turbines.
This is likely to have sparked hundreds of millions of pounds in so-called constraint payments for the wind farm, which is run by Scottish energy giant SSE and France’s TotalEnergies.
These payments are made under a government scheme to encourage renewables, aimed at guaranteeing cash for green power even if it cannot be used.
Full story here.
Again it highlights the absurdity of building wind farms in the far north, where there is not enough demand or transmission capacity to utilise them. The Seagreen windfarm is fully 17 miles off the coast of Scotland.
Barnaby Wharton, of wind energy trade body Renewable UK, told the Telegraph:
“Everyone wants to see constraint payments minimised, so there’s an urgent need to build new grid capacity as fast as possible.
The industry is working closely with the Government to ensure that innovative solutions are rolled out at speed, such as new energy storage capacity, to add more flexibility into the system.”
Well in that case, Mr Wharton, it is your wind farms that should pay the bill, not consumers.
Meanwhile there’s more word salad from OFGEM:
A spokesman for regulator Ofgem said: “Harnessing more of our homegrown power benefits British consumers by reducing the impact of volatile international gas prices on bills.
It also helps meet electricity demand and creates growth and jobs in the clean power industry and associated supply chains as well as driving down constraint costs by enabling more homegrown power to be connected to the grid.”
By “volatile gas prices”, they really mean lower bills!
Seagreen’s Annual Accounts state that total generation in 2024/25 was 4590 GWh, but only 1040 GWh was sent to the grid:
Source: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06873902/filing-history
Revenue from sales, (inc constraints) totalled £295m, which works out at £64.27/MWh:
They have not yet triggered their CfD, which only covers 454 MW of the 1140 MW capacity – they preferred to hedge their bets. As the sales are all via PPA’s we don’t know the selling price.
But the CfD strike price currently stands at £56.25/MWh.
After making a substantial profit in 2023/24, on the back of high wholesale power prices, they lost money last year. This suggests that current strike prices are not viable. Seagreen’s gamble on high market prices seems to be backfiring.
See more here notalotofpeopleknowthat
Header image: Montrose Port Authority
Bold emphasis added
Tom
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Can anything ever be so retarded as green energy?
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