If you thought that Net Zero couldn’t get any sillier, it just has. Remember how, according to Boris Johnson, Britain was going to become the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’, exporting massive amounts of abundant power? Actually, we are importing record amounts of electricity: a net 330 terawatt-hours’ worth in 2024, equivalent to over 10 per cent of that consumed in Britain in 2024. This comes via subsea cables from France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.
UK households are also subsidising energy consumers abroad
But, as the energy company Octopus pointed out before a House of Lords committee on Tuesday, even when we do export electricity we are often doing so at a loss, with UK households effectively subsidising their counterparts in France and other countries. This bizarre arrangement is a function of our energy market rules and the failure to build grid capacity fast enough to match the power output from wind and solar farms.
The issue of constraint payments – compensation paid to wind farm operators when they are generating too much power to be fed into a grid which lacks the capacity to carry the energy around the country – is already widely known. Last year, wind farms were paid £382 million to turn off their turbines. Gas power plants in the south of England had to be switched up in order to make up the lost power, meaning that consumers had to pay twice over. The aggregate cost of constraints in 2025 was £1.4 billion, equivalent to £49 for every UK household.
