Britain hits £1.5bn wasted wind bill – three months earlier than in 2025
Brits have already forked out over £1.5bn paying wind farms to switch OFF (whilst expensive gas plants fire up instead)
£1.5bn milestone has been reached THREE MONTHS earlier than last year
September recorded SEVEN of the most expensive days EVER in the history of the Wasted Wind tracker
Costs could soar to £3.2bn by July 2027, the system operator warns
London, 5th October 2026 – Britain has already blown past last year’s entire £1.47 billion bill for switching off wind farms and firing up gas plants instead – with three months of the year still to go.
The cost lands on households and businesses through their energy bills.
Figures from the Wasted Wind tracker show September was a record-breaking month, including seven of the most expensive days in the tracker's history.* A staggering £404.3 million was racked up in wind-related constraint costs during September alone.
The single most expensive day was 30th September, when £30 million was paid out to wind and gas generators in just 24 hours.
These costs pile up when Britain's grid can’t get all the electricity being generated to where it's needed. Wind farms in Scotland are regularly paid to switch off, while expensive gas plants are paid to fire up and generate replacement power.
And temporary grid upgrade works have made existing bottlenecks even worse. Some transmission boundaries in Scotland (B4) are currently running at just 40% of capacity.
Higher gas prices, driven by geopolitical turmoil, are also pushing up the cost of replacing cheap wind.
And the bill is set to get even bigger. The system operator NESO forecasts £3.2 billion in constraint costs in the year to July 2027, while the government has warned costs could reach £10 billion by 2030.**
One way to cut the waste would be to follow other OECD countries’ example and introduce a wholesale pricing system that better reflects where power is being generated and where it is needed.
Analysis by FTI, commissioned by Octopus Energy, shows that such a system would cut bills across Britain, with a typical household saving up to £114 a year.***
Greg Jackson, Founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, said: “We've already blown past last year's entire bill, and customers are paying every pound of that waste. It's madness.
“We’re spending billions to build more grid, while failing to use our existing infrastructure more efficiently. Instead of paying to throw away homegrown cheap power, we should be using it to bring bills down for households and businesses."
-ENDS-
Data source: Elexon Insights
Notes to editors
* Across the tracker’s full dataset, dating back to 01/01/2018
** NESO Operational Transparency Forum (p. 16); DESNZ Reformed National Pricing Delivery Plan (p. 48)
*** Independent analysis by FTI (p. 4)
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