On Tuesday, there was yet more harrumphing from the press about payments to windfarms not to generate electricity. This from the Telegraph:

The so-called constraint payments have already cost an extraordinary £252m in the first two months of 2025, up from £158m over the same period last year, an increase of 60pc. In effect, Britain is paying more and more for these farms to do nothing.

The context to this is that power companies have always provided financial incentives to switch on and off electricity production and consumption depending on the current circumstances. The FT reported in November that, between them, the UK’s gas fired power stations already receive £1bn per annum just to be on standby. On top of this, demand flexibility schemes will pay energy intensive industries to stand down at times of high consumption – something that has happened for decades. Such incentives are routine and only attract attention when they provide an opportunity to bash renewable energy

That’s not to say it is efficient. There are already schemes to balance production and consumption of energy. Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, aka Electric Mountain, uses excess power to pump water up into a reservoir; this is then released at periods of high demand – say half time in a major football match when everyone decides to put on the kettle – to generate a sudden surge of electricity. There have been suggestions that excess energy could also be used to power hydrogen electrolysers, direct air capture systems or, more prosaically and probably more realistically, thermal water storage systems for district heating.

But as I discussed with Paul Glendinning of Northern Powergrid (NPG) on the pod, smart grids, EVs and other technological advances create a new opportunity to balance supply and demand in ever more elegant ways. NPG and Octopus have already run trials of giving away electricity to consumers for free when production is high and demand is low. You can see a scenario where your EV charger is alerted to free or cheap power, say in the middle of the night, and automatically starts charging the vehicle battery, ready for the morning.

So, I’d argue the Telegraph is right for all the wrong reasons. We shouldn’t be paying wind turbines not to produce energy, we should redesign the system to allow the ‘time-shifting’ of clean energy from when it is produced to when it is needed.