What is the point of Octopus Energy's wasted wind tracker?

The National

10 hours ago

If you go to the Octopus website, you will see a tracker which shows that so far in 2025 Britain has wasted almost £700 million switching off wind turbines and paying gas plants to switch on.
If you dive further into the tracker, you can see how much each day is being spent on wasted wind. On Tuesday, it was well over £1.1m. This is the equivalent of around 8411 MWh, which Octopus claims is enough to power Birmingham for one day.
Cue mind-blown emoji. What's going on here and why has Octopus launched this tracker? We spoke to the company's head of policy Jack Richardson to find out more.
Why has Octopus launched a wasted wind tracker?
Octopus Energy has been pushing for reform of the UK energy system for years and it is well-known as being a leading campaigner for zonal pricing.
Zonal pricing would split the UK into price regions based on local supply and demand.
Energy consumers would pay less for electricity if they are based close to electricity projects but more if they are based further away, meaning Scotland – with its abundance of renewables – could benefit enormously.
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But right now the UK has one national energy price despite the cost of producing electricity differing throughout the day across the country.
If an offshore wind farm in Scotland produces more electricity than the network can handle it is paid to turn off, or be "constrained", and a gas-fired power plant in the south of England is paid to turn on.
It is this baffling point that Octopus is trying to drive home with its new tracker – your money is going down the drain because the UK energy market isn't fit for purpose anymore.
Richardson said: 'The data is on our side, as you can see with wasted wind we've gone from constraints of £170 million in 2010 to over £1.5 billion for wind last year.
'We're nearly at £700m already this year and Niso [Energy] said we're on track for up to £8bn by 2030.
'So we know that zonal fixes that, that's why we're publishing the data to hold the other side's feet to the fire because they haven't actually come up with any alternative solutions yet, they've just said zonal is the wrong idea.'
Niche subject, big impact
Richardson admits that while Octopus has been shouting about how much money is being wasted on constraining wind farms for some time, it is often hard for such a niche topic to secure bandwith in a news agenda of global conflict and economic struggles.
But cut through it must as it is having a huge impact on people's finances and Richardson hopes this tracker will drive home that point.
(Image: Octopus Energy) 'The message is if we stick with the current system that's no longer fit for purpose and was designed for an age of big coal plants, big nuclear and gas plants, in the middle of the country, then we will get big bill rises the public have to pay,' he said.
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He went on: 'This is a debate about electricity markets so it's very niche and most people will ignore it, so I guess it's a way to show that yes, it's complicated, but it's having a big impact on people's lives, it's taking money out of people's pockets completely unnecessarily.
'We still go into some government departments, and they still don't quite know what's going on and when we tell them how wasteful the system is getting, they get pretty shocked.'
Zonal more efficient than grid investment
Last week it was announced energy bills are set to rise despite billions of pounds of investment to upgrade grid infrastructure.
Britain's energy watchdog Ofgem has given the go-ahead to an initial £24 billion of investment to upgrade UK energy infrastructure, but revealed the move will push up network charges on household bills by more than £100.
Richardson explained how zonal pricing could save a huge chunk of money in new infrastructure and give Scotland a much better deal.
'Zonal pricing would mean you need to build less grid,' he said.
'We had a report out finding that over 20 years you can spend up to £27bn less on the grid.
'In Scotland, the game at the moment is you've built all this very cheap wind energy and now we're going to build an extraordinary amount of grid to bring it all south, and in the meantime, we're going to switch off a bunch of wind farms.
'The plan at the moment is build a flabby grid to bring down all the power from Scotland rather than just cut bills everywhere and let Scotland have the cheap energy it's built.'
Preventing over tweaking
Octopus says a decision on whether the UK is going to bring in zonal pricing or simply try to reform national pricing is imminent.
But Richardson believes no amount of tweaking will ever be enough to fix the broken system compared to adopting zonal.
'If you keep the national price and whole aim of the game is to just tweak the outcomes rather than prevent bad outcomes in the first place then that's always going to be inherently more inefficient,' he said.