As wind hits new records in the U.K., more British households fail to pay their electricity bills

The United Kingdom’s main electricity supplier, the National Grid, says a milder and windy December resulted in wind power generated 41.2% of the nation’s electricity for the month, surpassing natural gas, which supplied 25.8% of the country’s December power.

Meanwhile, the Office of National Statistics reported Thursday, according to Reuters, that the number of British households who failed to pay their energy bills in December jumped 39% over the same month a year ago.

In the U.K. the annual share of electricity from wind and solar jumped from just under 1% in 2005 to nearly 29% in 2022. According to an annual electricity review from the National Grid, natural gas accounted for 32%. Wind provided 29.4% of the nation’s electricity generation, followed by nuclear, which provided 14.2%.

While wind and solar are often promoted as the cheapest form of energy, there are large costs that go into making them reliable. Since they both depend on the right weather conditions to produce power, they require a lot of infrastructure, including storage and transmission lines, both of which add costs to wind and solar energy.

Grid expert Lee Cordner illustrated these costs by calculating what it would cost to replace a 100 megawatt natural gas-fired power plant with a solar and battery facility. While the natural gas plant costs $125 million and uses about $10 million in fuel per year, the wind and battery system would cost approximately $2 billion and have to be replaced every 10 to 20 years.