John Swinney has built his renewed push for independence around England stealing Scotland’s wind and renewable energy, but a new report revealed that building more turbines and not improving the grid will lead to higher energy bills.
The SNP’s push for net zero has been dealt a huge blow after a damning new report found that increasing the number of wind farm in Scotland would actually push up energy bills – and not reduce them. John Swinney is building his renewed independence push around claiming that England is stealing Scotland’s renewable energy bonanza.
He released a paper insisting that breaking up the UK would lead to reductions of more than a third off energy bills. His explanation for this was the number of turbines producing energy already active, and the thousands more in the pipeline, as well as solar and tidal power, would supply all energy that was needed, without transmission costs.
But there is one major problem with the push for more wind power – there is not enough room on the grid, and bottlenecks with moving it from the north of the country southwards mean that it never makes it there. Instead, wind farm developers are paid substantial sums to switch off turbines so the grid isn’t overloaded.
The cost of this is added to energy bills – and if the infrastructure isn’t improved then these bills will keep rising. Energy market analysis provider Montel EnAppSys published its Curtailed Renewables in GB and Ireland report which found that over 10 Terawattt hours (TWh) of clean electricity was turned off in Scotland in 2025, enough to power every domestic household in Scotland for the year.
Over £343m in curtailment payments were made to Scottish-based generators that were turned down, a cost paid for by consumers. Generators in Northern Scotland alone accounted for 8.8TWh of curtailed power, costing £300m. It the windiest part of the country and is where a significant number of turbines are situated.
There are plans in place to build thousands more turbines in the next few year, but an expert has warned this may hike up energy bis further. Report author and Senior Energy Market Analyst at Montel EnAppSys, Fintan Devenney said: “The rollout of wind projects in Scotland is not currently expected to slow down. In the Scotwind leasing rounds in 2022, 20 offshore wind projects acquired seabed rights in Scottish waters.
“Should all these projects be completed, almost 30GW of additional wind generation capacity would be added to the Scottish grid, increasing total Scottish wind generation capacity more than threefold. If local flexibility and grid buildout were to remain at current levels, curtailment volumes and costs could rise by a similar order of magnitude.
“Ensuring that renewables can be deployed effectively is therefore key as government looks to balance decarbonisation goals against consumer costs and security of supply. Unless policymakers pay attention to the need to marry renewable power with public systems and infrastructure, then an outdated transmission network could continue to drive up consumer bills as NESO is forced to operate a network potentially unfit to accommodate the government’s 2030 clean power goals.
“It’s also worth noting that the amount of electricity curtailed in GB could have powered every data centre in the country in 2025. A recent policy paper suggested that data centres choosing to site themselves in Scotland could receive, in effect, an energy price discount of up to £24/MWh. This is an interesting method of incentivising the optimal siting of demand to solve these issues, particularly as the paper also suggests there will be no knock-on effect to bill-payers.”
Assessing the potential impacts of paying developers to turn off turbines in the future as more connect to the grid, he added: “The analysis shows that only 61% of the wind power which could have been generated in Northern Scotland actually made it to the grid. The cost of turning down that other 39% is passed on to energy bills, meaning consumers are the ones left counting the costs.”
