LLast week the energy record was broken: not in the price of oil and gas but in the production of wind power. On Wednesday lunchtime, between 1.30 and 2pm, the turbines were producing 24 gigawatts of clean energy. In an instant Ed Miliband’s vision of superpower was realised: 55 per cent of our electricity was wind, 22 per cent solar and 10 per cent nuclear. Only 2 percent come from archetypes. The retail price was just £4.81 per megawatt hour.
But look at what happened 11 weeks earlier. On the evening of 5 January the price paid to the generating companies increased to £477/MWh. A few days later gas was producing two-thirds of all electricity, and wind and solar production were down to just 2GW.
Low wind and sunlight – a state of affairs known by the German name of Dunkelflaute, which means “dark silence” – is the National Grid’s new nightmare. It’s the most obvious problem with renewable energy, yet we find ourselves painfully exposed to it. After the last coal-fired power stations shut down in 2024, last winter was the first with gas as our sole source of flexible electricity. On 8 January 2024, at tea time, Dunkelflaute caused electricity prices to rise to £2,900/MWh.
The reason for these high prices is that Britain’s electricity generation system will use whatever resources it has first and then switch to gas. When our power stations cannot meet the supply, the grid has to switch to imports.
Britain’s expansion of renewable energy has been remarkable. Capacity was about 5GW in 2010; today it exceeds 30GW. In theory, it is cheap. It’s also a dream to manage.
Britain has an average electricity demand of 33GW and capacity of around 40GW. By 2035, according to the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), our average demand for electricity – boosted by the projected rise in the use of electric cars and heat pumps and the growth of data centers – will have risen to 52GW. By then our wind and solar capacity will be somewhere in the region of 150GW. Three times up! But this power of relaxation remains useless in Dunkelflaute.
Let’s take a closer look at this problem. RMetS looked at the climate during that cold, still month in January 2025 and assessed how our 2035 energy grid would perform in such conditions. For parts of the moon the wind would generate a lot of electricity. Sometimes it would produce nothing. So is the actual size under the 2050 system, to an extreme: there will be days in January when Britain produces almost twice the electricity it needs, and days when renewables produce almost zilch.
Nuclear power is the obvious choice to bridge the gap. But our capacity, 6.5GW, will fall in 2028 when Hartlepool and Heysham 1 close. Even in 2034 we will have less nuclear power than now. In the meantime there is energy storage – we have pumped storage, and the government is betting big on batteries in 2030 – but they are also not very useful in the long Dunkelflaute.
But there are also problems in spiritual days. Electricity cannot be turned on where it is needed, so we pay wind turbines to run and gas turbines to generate power. The total “balancing costs” came to £2.7 billion last year and meant that wind production was 13 percent lower than it could have been.
The reason is history: when Britain’s national grid was built in the 1920s and 1930s, it was designed to connect coal-fired power stations to urban centers that provided electricity. In the modern era the center of gravity has moved north: towards Scotland and the sea turbines in the east. So Britain is being rebuilt, at a cost of £70 billion over the next few years. Major power lines are being built that will transport power from Scotland to England, and from east to west. But most projects won’t come online until 2034.
And all this is expensive. For example energy analyst Ben James suggests that even if wind gives us cheaper electricity than today, the average bill in 2030 will be £1,045 – around £80 more, including inflation. Much of that difference is network costs: the cost of transferring electricity from one end of Britain to the other and distributing it to households, but also paying wind turbines to stop spinning and gas turbines to burn, are about to rise.
Wind and solar are the cheapest sources of electricity we have. Building a network that can carry them – and emergency situations for when it’s dark and still is – is a no-brainer. Until the internet reaches our speeds, British families will pay the price.
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