Britain's energy problem – why firms are paid to NOT provide power

Britain's energy problem is burning too much expensive gas.

The main solution is building renewables.

Meanwhile small problems with renewables are hyped way beyond their relevance in the press.

Most of the cost of this particular article's "problem", is in fact burning expensive gas.

What people tend to leave out is the government guarantees the price wind turbines receive for electricity at say 7p a kwh. So they lose money if the wholesale price goes less that that. But they make money when the price goes above that price. So in the bbc's example while turbines where paid while turned off at one end of the grid, at the other end of the grid the gas booster generating plant was turned on and set the market price quite high, perhaps 15 or 20p a kw. So the wind turbines that were still running flat out made the government lots of profit offsetting the losses from the turned off ones... This produces a head splitting mix of incentives between government costs, taxes and electricity prices to consumers. But overall since the Ukraine energy crisis renewables have probably not cost the government/tax payer as much as people think.