Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas
By Ruth London
Ruth looks at how the scandal of curtailment – paying windfarms to turn off – is just one example of the deeply entrenched, deliberately designed unfairness in our energy system. She tackles the question of how to build a system which works for all of us, not just a wealthy few, and lays the groundwork for a new phase in Fuel Poverty Action’s Energy For All campaign.
Who’s being left behind in the energy transition?
Imagine if the extra power on windy or sunny days went to the people who need it most – not the wealthy few. Imagine guaranteed access to free or cheap electricity to cover essentials: heating, cooking, lighting, washing, charging disability aids. That’s Energy For All – and it’s within reach.
We also want to unlock the potential of small-scale renewables: rooftop solar, heat pumps, community wind power. These exist, but too often, working-class and marginalised communities are left out. Instead, we’re forced to pay high standing charges and inflated tariffs while being denied the very technologies that could bring our bills down.
The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed – to keep us paying and keep the profits flowing.
Not long ago, many people believed we could meet all our energy needs very cheaply – maybe even for free. Instead, our prices are going through the roof.
The situation we’re in:
- Big corporations are pocketing the savings from the transition to renewable energy.
- Households with solar panels, EVs, and batteries get free energy while the rest of us are locked out.
- “Excess” energy from wind and solar is wasted – literally turned off – costing us billions in “curtailment” payments.
- Battery farms are being built to store such “excess” energy, only to resell it at profit – not to the people who need it most.
- Community energy is blocked from serving local homes, forced to sell into the national grid at inflated prices.
- This is a system built on inequality and waste. It’s rigged to serve profit, not people.
Renewables are not being developed or used in a way that helps most people’s bills. Instead, the savings are being captured by mega-corporations, and a few well-off customers. Or the energy is simply being wasted, energy we could use cheaply or even for free.
For example, the wind and the sun can put out so much energy that wind farms and solar farms are “curtailed” on very windy or sunny days because the energy they produce would overwhelm the national grid. And we are actually paying to turn off wind turbines and solar farms.
We pay for this “curtailment” via our bills. It has cost us around £1 billion so far.
The absurdity of curtailment
The cost of curtailment, paid for through our bills, was £1bn a year in 2023 and 2024. In energy terms even the 2024 amount wasted was 8.3TWh. That is the equivalent of powering 3 million homes all year for free, or giving every home in the UK 10% of its electricity for free (about 270kWh) – an immediate clean power bonus.
The cost of curtailment is projected to rise to £3bn a year by 2030 – the equivalent of 9 million homes, or a 30% discount for every UK home.1
Instead the main plan is to spend huge sums on battery farms and grid upgrades. This won’t help reduce fuel poverty, as we will pay these vast costs via higher unit tariffs and standing charges.
A solution?
So we are asking: Instead of paying wind farms to stand still, why can’t the “excess” electricity be given away for free?
In fact some of it IS given away2 – but it largely benefits households with electric vehicles (EVs) or space for big batteries.
Free energy could help bring in Energy For All, where every household gets the energy it needs to cover the basics.
In the meantime, energy can go directly, cheap or for free, to homes in the area where it is produced, reducing the need for expensive upgrades of the national grid. Work on making such energy available to some households in need is already under way.
Working towards change in other countries
For many years now, energy cooperatives and some local authorities have been running pilots and exploring ways to end the injustice in who has access to the benefits of renewables.
Countries in Europe, including Ireland have taken a lead on this. But most of the projects are small scale pilots, affecting dozens or hundreds of homes, although one Belgian city, Mechelen, aims to connect 1400 to renewable energy this year.
The UK cannot boast even as much as this. Much hope and hard work is going into new schemes, but the total investment in such efforts is pathetic, when compared to the billions being invested in fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and carbon capture and storage.
Cheap wind and sun – but big bills
This is not the only way renewable energy can transform our lives. Renewable energy can be produced on a small scale, on our own rooftops, on our streets and highways, or as a small scale community resource. That is already happening! But it’s happening unfairly.
Most of us are locked out of the benefits of solar panels, heat pumps, heat networks, cheap night time electricity, and cheap electricity at other times when demand is low or on windy days.
Unfair access
To smooth out the peaks of demand for energy, electricity is often cheaper at night. Households with Electric Vehicles benefit greatly from night time tariffs. Storage heater users, who are usually much poorer, do not get such low rates and also pay a lot more during the day. So, storage heaters are too expensive to run despite helping our energy system make great use of cheap clean off-peak energy.
Some suppliers are offering their customers cheaper “time of use” tariffs (e.g. half-price power on Sundays). Such offers should be spread and standardised, so everyone has access to them.
Some pretty simple and commonplace tech (like hot water tanks, storage heaters, and timers) could help ordinary households to store energy and take advantage of times when the wind or sun create “too much electricity”.
There are already millions of storage heaters and hot water tanks in homes that could benefit from cheap and free excess energy, but instead we have spent huge sums ripping them out and replacing them with gas combi boilers! This is because our rigged pricing system makes electricity four times more expensive than gas.
In some places, even in much poorer countries like China, solar panels are everywhere, covering rooftops in rich and poor parts of cities, and all over the countryside. Here, they are still the preserve of a relatively well-off minority.
Even with government grants, many people can’t afford them, or are too hard stretched to cope with the bureaucracy of applying, the disruption of installation, or the consequences when – as so often with building projects – nothing seems to go right.
Meanwhile, social housing tenants in flats may have solar panels on the roof of their building – but get little or no benefit from the electricity they produce. The savings go to the landlord – or an energy firm – instead.
It’s a similar story with heat pumps – which can save tons of carbon emissions and huge amounts off your bills, but are often mis-sold, badly installed, or designed without attention to people’s need for quiet at night and in the daytime, the space in our homes, or whether we can actually control them. They work fine in some situations, and they could be a game-changer for far more of us.
While government grants are available, it has not been a priority to overcome the obstacles that would make this revolutionary tech available to millions.
Meanwhile, heat networks, which work like central heating for a whole block of flats, a whole estate, or a district, are being rolled out at pace. But new legislation has not dealt with the hodge podge of design and installation by private energy enterprises and private and social landlords, whose key priority is their bottom line.
You cannot “switch” off a heat network, there is no price cap, and many residents will still be subject to frequent and long lasting “outages” of heating and hot water, with no effective way to end the nightmare. As we write, some residents are being taken to court by their landlord, Lambeth council, because they cannot afford to pay their soaring heat bills.
Heat networks are being promoted by the government as a green alternative, because it is easier to use renewable sources and waste heat in a communal supply than in each individual home. Fairness, however, is not on the agenda.
Community energy projects want to help but are not allowed to sell their product locally – it has to be sent through the national grid and it’s tied into national pricing!
Community energy
Community Energy projects can produce cheap, sustainable electricity, but they’re not allowed to sell it to you locally – it has to go into the national grid to make somebody a profit.
We’re calling for the funds promised for community energy projects to be released NOW. And we support Power For The People’s Local Electricity Bill, which would require the Secretary of State to establish a framework to support the growth of community energy schemes.
And now, battery farms are being built that will syphon off “excess” electricity from solar farms and wind farms – to be sold off at high prices, for a profit.
Electricity produced renewably only costs about 7p per unit (kWh).3 Instead, we are paying, automatically, the price of electricity produced by burning gas in the most expensive plant at any time – which can cost DOUBLE that amount, and is much more polluting as well.
On top of that, the electricity tariff is distorted by adding onto it “levies” for all sorts of other costs – many of which we don’t even want.
Unfair levies
Levies on our electricity bills are being imposed to fund:
- the expansion of nuclear energy
- new projects for carbon capture use and storage
- a huge expansion of the national grid
- executive salaries and bonuses
- shareholder dividends and buybacks
- Eco4 – energy company obligations to retrofit homes for energy efficiency
- the cost of failing energy retail firms
- bad debt
Most people are unaware of what they are paying for, and would not agree to pay for these expenses if they had any choice in the matter. Some, like energy efficiency retrofits, are urgent but need to be organised and carried out much better, and would be more fairly funded from taxation than from a levy on our bills.
Levies are not only put on our bills – they are actually added to the standing charge, which you have to pay no matter how little power you actually use. To pay these levies, a pensioner leaving hospital, who has a prepayment meter, will have to pay off their accumulated standing charge – often simply unaffordable – before they can even boil a kettle.
The result is that electricity ends up costing 34p per unit, including the high standing charges! The levies are added to the standing charge which falls disproportionately on people on low incomes who use hardly any energy at all.
If you’re living in a bedsit you pay the same standing charge as people who are heating a mansion. They get the solar panels, we get the standing charges.
None of this is fair. Not the pricing system. Not the balance between gas and electricity, which could be a cheap, clean fuel for everybody. Not the distribution of the kit that we need in our homes and communities to make use of these new possibilities. Not the grotesque waste of the power that we could have for free on windy or very sunny days.
Costing the Earth
These are just some examples of injustices and waste that deprive most people of the benefits of renewable energy.
Injustice and waste keep millions in fuel poverty. They also threaten our chances of mitigating climate change, because many people are losing hope in the alternatives to fossil fuels. When you just keep paying more and more, it’s easy to believe claims that “green” initiatives are a middle class plot at the expense of people in poverty.
So long as the injustices continue, these claims will continue to undermine urgent attempts to move away from fossil fuels. For this reason, too, it is urgent to make sure that the promise of renewables comes true for everybody.
There is no time to waste in protecting the climate, as much as we still can do that. And there is no excuse for wealthy people to be saving money while others go cold, hungry or into debt.
It is urgent, too, to make sure that the transition to renewable energy is not at the expense of workers in the energy industry: jobs extracting fossil fuels like oil or coal have not always been safe or pleasant but they’ve been relatively well paid, and whole communities depend on them.
These workers are organising now, to ensure that they can transfer to equally well paid, skilled jobs elsewhere, for instance in wind, or solar energy, or in insulating homes so less heat flies out our roofs, our walls and our windows.
Equally, new mines have opened up to extract the metals, minerals and rare earths needed for batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, cables and controls. These mines, often in the Global South, have devastated vast areas of forest, agricultural land, and water.
The labour conditions are lethal, indigenous communities are displaced or go hungry, and resisters face assassination. No one can pretend this is “fair” or part of a “just transition”. Nor is it necessary.
Supply chains
The minerals required for renewable energy infrastructure include lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths. They are extracted by underground or surface mining. Many key minerals are located in Africa and South America, and more are spread over every continent, with significant reserves in China, Australia and Indonesia.
In zones dedicated to extraction, men, women, and children are dying every day – from dangerous, exploitative labour conditions, heat and long hours, from pollution, from chronic conflicts and wars over access to the minerals, and from hunger as they’ve lost the lands they lived on. Many who resist are killed by assassins, working on behalf of the companies, with the blessing of governments.
This dirty under-belly of clean energy is not an acceptable part of a transition to renewables.
Indigenous communities and others in “sacrifice zones” are fighting to the death for their land, and for the forests and biodiversity that the whole world now depends on.
The battle is not new – the same conditions have long applied to extraction of oil, gas and coal, even in wealthy countries like the United States, and in Britain where prolonged union organising improved conditions to a degree.
In fact, the new minerals are often extracted by the same huge multinational corporations as fossil fuels, funded by the same banks, guaranteed by the same governments, with the same disregard for life and human rights.
This is not peculiar to renewable energy, it is business as usual. But we cannot continue on the same exploitative track, and nor is there any need to.
Building fair access to renewable energy on an international level must include “due diligence” in monitoring supply chains. But this alone is likely to produce only token improvements, with ineffective monitoring systems.
Change will be limited without effective grievance procedures to give a voice and power to people directly affected, compensation for losses, cancellation of debt, reparations, transfer of technology and know-how, and an end to the exploitative gold rush for precious earths and minerals.
Once the minerals are mined and put to use in infrastructure, a high proportion of their product – energy – is wasted. The renewables revolution does need more of many minerals, but it does not need enough to see them wasted in wind turbines standing still to protect our national grid.
A never-estimated proportion of what people’s hard labour extracts from the earth is actually thrown away on schemes that don’t work, built-in obsolescence, private jets, leaky homes, a gargantuan advertising industry that targets customers by accumulating data on us, and military equipment that kills and is then blown up.
As we free ourselves from the economy built around the fossil fuel industry, the waste of lives, resources, and the products of our labour is one of the things that needs to go.
Getting involved
FPA is collecting stories and building alliances. Are you:
- Locked out of access to solar or wind power in your area?
- Struggling with a heat pump or heat network that doesn’t work well?
- Paying high bills despite living near renewable infrastructure?
- Part of a blocked community energy project?
- Facing the impacts of a local BESS or data centre taking up public energy?
- Angry at the way electricity pricing is linked to the volatile, international, price of gas?
Please get in touch if you are part of a movement for energy justice, low bills, or protection of the climate and local environments.
We’ll be updating our Energy For All manifesto. You can be a part of shaping the fair access to renewable energy we urgently need.
Acknowledgements: my thanks to Martha Myers-Lowe, Jonathan Bean and Hannah Berry for their contributions to this article.
