Enough wind wasted to heat 1,000,000 homes
Stuart Reid – Director of Customer Solutions
Over the past 6 months I’ve been asked by a number of people to describe my ideas – and therefore the AMP heat decarbonisation investment rationale – on the energy system, electricity markets and the interactions between the increased growth of renewable electricity generation and opportunities for decarbonising heat.
I’ve finally managed to put these thoughts into a bit of a newsletter that I’m circulating to various people that I know – a mix of existing clients, people we’ve been discussing projects with, policy people and those who work in the energy sector. I’ve included you on the initial circulation list because I thought you might find it interesting and I hope that turns out to be the case.
Please feel free to forward on to others that you think might also be interested. The plan is to put these thoughts out whenever I think there is something worth saying.
4 years ago myself and colleagues had what we thought at the time was a simple idea… It went along the lines of ‘it’s mad to pay windfarms to turn off, surely we can instead use that ‘curtailed’ power to decarbonise heat.
Necessity is the mother of invention, or so the saying goes, and this idea also coincided with the ending of the Renewable Heat Incentive which had been the main mechanism we had previously been using to underpin the business case for our investments in renewable heat projects.
Fast forward 4 years to today and two things have happened:
- The national grid now pay a lot more windfarms, a lot more often, to turn off than was the case 4 years ago – and the numbers and costs are rising all the time.
- We’ve managed to crack the commercial and technical model for how to use that otherwise wasted power to decarbonise businesses. Indeed we now have our first big project operational. It’s a 12MW electrode boiler at Simpsons Malt in Berwick and its helping to decarbonise a maltings operation that is the biggest single source of supply into the whole of the Scotch Whisky sector.
Whilst 12MW is a big boiler – it could provide enough heat to meet the heat demand of 2,000 new houses on a cold winters day – this is just the first of many of these projects that we want to build. We’ve reviewed a lot of different technology solutions and a lot of different business cases and we know the most cost-effective way to decarbonise is to do so flexibly – taking advantage of power that would otherwise be wasted. There’s a lot of complexity around how, where and when to do this but in simple terms this is an opportunity that can be capitalised on in Scotland today and in some other areas of England in the not-too-distant future.
To illustrate the scale of the opportunity we’ve developed a tracker that measures curtailed (wasted) wind across the country. We built it because it’s impossible to manage a problem – or size an opportunity – without first quantifying it.
Here’s a look at the data from Scotland in October
The scale of wasted wind – October 2025
The headline figure is over 1.42 million MWh of clean electricity generation was paid to be switched off in Scotland in October. To put that number into context the average house in the UK uses 12MWh of gas for heating in a year. That means in October alone, we’ve wasted enough power to heat 120,000 houses for a whole year – or more than 1 million houses for the month of October.
The real cost of this paradox
This isn’t just an academic number; it’s a massive, untapped source of low-cost, green power. But more importantly, it’s a symptom of a fundamental market disconnect.
On one hand, Scottish industry – a cornerstone of the economy – remains exposed to volatile global gas prices for essential process heat. On the other, we are literally paying wind farms to shut down because the grid, particularly around key constraints like the B4 and B6 line, cannot export that power.
We’re simultaneously importing expensive carbon-intensive fuel while throwing away cheaper, local, green energy. Commercially, ethically and from a resource management and carbon perspective this is an absurd situation.
The national-level solution is to build more grid capacity. That’s a vital long-term goal, but it’s a multi-billion pound, multi-decade project. It doesn’t help a business hit their 2030 decarbonisation targets or manage next quarter’s energy bill.
Additionally, over time there will be more and more renewable electricity capacity built right around the UK and across the rest of Europe. This means that even if power can flow seamlessly across previously congested electrical grid boundaries there will still be significant periods when more power is being generated than can be used. Batteries will help manage some of these dynamics but the flexible use of this power to offset fossil gas consumption in the manufacturing sector is an even stronger business case solution.
A more direct, commercially viable approach
My perspective is simple: this surplus energy shouldn’t be seen as a national grid problem. For a number of strategic sites that use significant volumes of fossil gas, it is a localised opportunity.
Instead of waiting for the national grid to be fixed, the opportunity is to capture this surplus power at the source, near the grid constraint, and convert it directly into high-grade industrial heat.
This approach creates an immediate, local “off-take” for that wasted power, turning a national liability into a commercial advantage. It’s the most direct route for business to decouple heat costs from the gas market and build genuine operational resilience. What really excites me, and the team at AMP, is that this is something that we have already proven can work and we don’t need to wait for any new Government policy in order to get on with the projects – we can take control today and deliver real carbon savings.
There are a number of different policies in development – some will help decarbonisation efforts and others will hinder – but I can cover these in future editions. I also intend to cover some of the complexities around how we trade the power for our solutions and our forward forecasts for how constraints will change over time as more renewables & storge are built and the grid cables are upgraded.
For now I thought it helpful to put out this initial piece setting out the big idea and illustrating the scale of the problem we are trying to solve. Please feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss any of this further or to forward on to someone you think might be interested.
