Sunny and windy weather and low electricity usage owing to the lockdown had led to record low demand on the network, National Grid said.
The costs of keeping the lights on in Britain spiralled to more than £50 million in the four days from Friday to bank holiday Monday as National Grid had to pay surplus wind and solar farms to switch off and take a series of other measures to prevent blackouts.
The bill for what the company described as a “very expensive weekend” ultimately will feed through to businesses and households on their energy bills and is almost five times as high as the costs of balancing supply and demand during the same period last year.
National Grid said that sunny and windy weather and unusually low electricity usage owing to the lockdown had led to record low demand on the network.
The initial £51 million estimate, disclosed yesterday, compares with about £11 million in the same four-day period of 2019 and does not include further costs, including sums paid to Sizewell B nuclear plant under a £50 million contract for it to run at half-capacity this summer.
National Grid disclosed last week that it expected to spend £500 million more than normal keeping the lights on this summer because of low demand caused by the lockdown.
It spent about £19 million between Friday and Monday paying large-scale wind farms to switch off, according to the Renewable Energy Foundation, a group critical of green energy costs, a figure not disputed by National Grid.
National Grid said that it had spent a further £7 million paying small-scale wind and solar farms to switch off through a new scheme, as well as paying millions to the operators of gas-powered plants to fire up to keep the system stable. It also had to pay about £4 million to limit the use of its own subsea power cables, restricting the amount of surplus wind power that could be exported, because they carry so much electricity that if they failed it would destabilise the system and trigger blackouts.
The costs were further inflated by a fire below a transmission cable on Friday that meant it was unable to transfer some wind power output to where it was most needed.
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