​Description:
Britain's wind curtailment bill hit £1.35 billion in 2025. Our first documentary set out how we got here - the transmission bottlenecks between Scotland and England, the B4 and B6 boundaries, and why gas still fills the gap when the grid can't cope. It also named the three fixes on the table: more wires, more storage, and market reform. The film generated hundreds of questions from viewers. This follow-up answers them.

Why is the UK system designed so that generators pick where to build, even when those choices drive up constraint costs for everyone? Why haven't big batteries already displaced gas on constraint days? When do the new subsea cables between Scotland and England actually go live, and how much constraint will they clear? Why did the UK reject zonal pricing, and is "reformed national pricing" really the same thing in different language? And why is the government paying data centres to move to Scotland when Scottish households aren't seeing any benefit from the cheap wind sitting on their doorstep?

​Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:25 Why build wind in Scotland at all?
1:07 Batteries vs pumped hydro
2:16 The four Eastern Green Link cables
3:04 Zonal vs national pricing
3:47 Why Texas works differently
4:39 Is it fair?
4:51 Closing

​Music licensed via Artlist.

This video is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

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Transcript:
If I'm a customer in Scotland, I'm pretty annoyed about this, right? So why are data centres getting money off their bills, but I'm not? Why is my heat, why is my EV, any less of a demand than a data centre?
Hello everyone, welcome back. Thank you so much for all of your questions on our recent wind curtailment documentary. Today we're going to run through some of those top questions. Let's jump in.
There are only so many places where we can build wind - where there's good availability of land, and where there's also a good wind resource. The way that the system is designed is that it is the role of the generator to find those good locations and to build out those projects. The constraints that get caused by that are not to be dealt with by the particular generator. And so that's what has moved the system into this direction.
There have been some really good news stories in terms of the amount of wind that we are generating, and that has been pushing gas off the system - which means that we run off gas less often. At a time when we're seeing, say, war in the Middle East, that is an incredibly useful thing to have as a system.
Then there's pumped hydro. We currently have four big stations in the UK that are about 40 years old. To build new ones - they take a really long time to build, they're really expensive to build, and you have to be quite selective in terms of geography. You need a hill, and you need a lake.
But really, what we're seeing is lithium-ion systems - so, big batteries - are actually quite a bit cheaper to build. And they can be built anywhere. So for that kind of 8 to 10 to 12 hours of storage that pumped hydro is good at, we're seeing more and more that batteries can compete with that, and do so at a cheaper cost to the consumer. We see batteries in flexibility markets: when we're very close to delivery, batteries are cheaper than gas units.
But we don't want to build an infinite number of these things. Like all things in system planning - and in power markets - you don't want to have too much of something. You want to utilise it. You want to get good value from the thing you build. So you don't want too much transmission, you don't want too many batteries, you don't want too many gas plants. You're looking for the right mix of all these technologies.
The Eastern Green Links are high-voltage direct current cables that will go under the sea from Scotland to England. These are being built. EGL 1 and EGL 2 should go live in 2029. EGL 3 and EGL 4 should go live in 2033. Collectively, they will take 8 gigawatts of power from Scotland to England and will ease the constraints that we see.
These projects take 8 to 10 years to build. They've actually been pretty quick compared to big national infrastructure projects - just think how long it's taking to get Hinkley up and running. And at the moment, we are in this period of very high constraint while we essentially wait for these projects to go live.
In a zonal pricing system, it's exactly the same as a national pricing system - except when constraints happen. When constraints happen, the market will split on either side of that constraint. On the side that has too much generation, the price will go low. On the demand side, the price will go high.
We're now looking at something called reformed national pricing, and we are yet to see what that really looks like. But the core parts of zonal pricing will probably try and come through in reformed national pricing. So we will try and give people cheaper energy if you're based in Scotland and it's windy. Let's see what happens.
The thing that is kind of critical to this is: if you look at data centres, or if you look at demand, in Texas, you know exactly where those cheap parts of the system are, because that's coming through in the market price. So you know, okay, I need to go and locate in this area because the prices are low. In West Texas there's an awful lot of solar, there's a lot of wind, and that's where a lot of the data centres have been built - as a result of the locational pricing they have.
Whereas in the UK, because we have a national price - the same price across all of the UK - the problem is that we don't have that signal running through to give people an incentive to locate in Scotland. So here we have to have a government programme, the AI Growth Zones, which is paying people to go and locate in Scotland, where the wind is - which will help reduce constraints. But that's a government intervention, as opposed to a result of the market price.
If I'm a customer in Scotland, I'm pretty annoyed about this, right? So why are data centres getting money off their bills, but I'm not? Why is my heat, why is my EV, any less of a demand than a data centre?
So thank you, everyone, for watching. Thank you for all of your comments - we loved working through them. And keep a lookout for our next documentary, coming soon.