The United Kingdom's Energy Minister Ed Miliband is a foaming-at-the-mouth climate cultist who has done his level best to destroy the once affordable and comfortable standard of living his misty isles once enjoyed.
And no matter the warnings - and there have been plenty - and no matter how dire the situation at the moment - breaths held thanks to Hormuz - Miliband keeps the country marching inexorably towards a dark, dank, and bitterly cold renewable future.
He's been crowing lately about the sudden boom in rooftop solar in the UK, which has been more of a reaction to the dearth of 'affordability' in any of the renewables that have been providing what power the UK has at the moment, rather than evidence of faith in the technology.
More than 27,000 solar installations were completed last month – the highest monthly total since 2012 as people embrace clean tech as a result of the Iran war, figures suggest.
...Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said: “The numbers speak for themselves – the highest monthly installation of solar in over a decade, rising capacity and more than two million solar installations now powering homes across Britain.
“This is our clean energy mission in action – helping families weather global energy shocks, bringing bills down, and getting Britain off the fossil fuel rollercoaster.”
Home solar becomes more attractive as the cost of renewables pushes energy prices higher.
— Matt (@FreddyBRefusnik) May 1, 2026
Oh the irony.
Miliband's 'bringing bills down' has never happened once. They have only gone up.
With analysis showing heat pumps cost £138 a year more to run than boilers and two thirds of users reporting higher bills, no wonder no one wants to buy one. But when will green elites admit the game is up, asks Ben Pile. https://t.co/IiTvCWPObr
— Toby Young (@toadmeister) April 30, 2026
Part of the reason is the vicious cycle that depends on renewables forces everyone, consumers and providers alike, into - as a new report from the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (OFGEM) in the UK inadvertently lays out.
It touts how the massive investment being made in Britain's electricity grid upgrades is going to result in constraint payment reductions.
'Constraint payments' are what the British government (and this holds true everywhere) has agreed to pay a renewable power generator, be it wind or solar, etc., for periods when their weather-generated power is produced even though demand is low. That excess power can't be utilized; most often, it usually has nowhere to be stored, yet the government has to compensate the producer regardless. So they pay the renewable operator to switch the wind turbine off.
In other scenarios, like below, infrastructure - transmission lines - might not be available to carry the 'cheaper' renewable electricity to the area where it's needed, and the renewable operator is asked to 'constrain' their production in order not to fry the lines and the grid with a power surge.
Naturally, they are compensated for that, too.
...Any piece of grid equipment has a physical limit on the amount of power that can safely be transmitted through it, and exceeding this limit will cause it to overheat or malfunction and could cause failure. Where there are physical constraints on the network, due to these pieces of equipment reaching their safe capacity limit, or when planned outages due to reinforcement works occur, a bottleneck forms and action needs to be taken.
Take the example of an offshore wind farm on a particularly windy day, when the abundant energy it produces will be cheaper than the alternative from a gas-fired power station. This energy will enter the UK’s transmission network - the National Grid - at a specific point, but this could be a significant distance from where demand is located and where it is needed. Infrastructure is therefore required to safely move the power across the country, but this is not always sufficient due to the limitations of the system, meaning sometimes power cannot physically be transferred from one region to another.
In this case, the generator feeding into the system (the wind farm) may be asked to vary and reduce its output until the bottleneck has been cleared. This curtailment is done to maintain overall stability and avoid a scenario in which power surges and overwhelms the grid, which would result in damage to infrastructure, domestic and commercial appliances, and potentially blackouts.
Until further grid infrastructure and energy storage solutions are developed, this is the most cost-effective way to safely operate the country’s electricity system.
OFGEM is claiming that its grid upgrade will reduce these constraint payments and finally save Britain's suffering utility ratepayers some hard-earned coin.
That works out to an easily disproven fantasy, as a renewable grid is an expensive snake that eats its own tail.
...In 2024/25, total balancing costs hit £2.7 billion, of which £1.7 billion arose from constraint payments. Prior to the Climate Change Act, these balancing costs would have been inconsequential.
Grid upgrades will add about £9 billion a year to bills by 2031. Self evidently, this cost will far outweigh any potential savings. What they might do, of course, is reduce the cost of future constraint bills, which are projected to massively increase:
...NESO project that constraint payments could rise to £7.2 billion in 2030, before OFGEM’s £80 billion grid upgrades kick in, dropping back to £2.9 billion in 2031.
In other words, after the upgrades, constraint payments will be just as high as now. If we don’t upgrade, constraints will increase. If we do, network charges will increase.
Either way, our bills go up!
Significantly, NESO state that constraint payments will resume their upward increase after 2031, as more renewables come on stream. This will require yet more grid upgrades, a never ending roundabout it seems!
Paul points out in his breakdown that there is currently much more wind in Scotland on good days than there are sufficient transmission lines to bring all of that power out. And while these upgrades are meant to help with that problem, the amount of solar and wind the UK has coming online dwarfs whatever plans for upgrades are in the works at the moment. The numbers are insane, what the country is going to pay to waste on, as he says, windy and/or sunny days.
...In their Clean Power 2030 Report, NESO reckoned we would have to throw away 83 TWh of excess wind and solar power in 2030 – 22 TWh curtailed and 61 TWh exported at a loss (they hope!).
Last year, the figure was 9 TWh.
That's absolutely unconscionable. There shouldn't be another single shovel of dirt turned over for a renewable project, particularly a large-scale one, for the next forty years, if ever.
BUILD SOME DAMN NUCLEAR REACTORS AND GAS PLANTS
But that's not what cultists do. They lumber blindly ahead.
Miliband's latest pie-in-the-sky is solar on the water, because the UK obviously doesn't have enough solar cells already blanketing the countryside and rooftops.
Ed Miliband is preparing to blanket reservoirs and lakes with solar farms as part of Labour’s push towards net zero.
The Energy Secretary will launch a consultation to make it easier to build floating solar power plants, after a report that hailed their potential as a clean energy source.
Floating solar schemes use the same panels as land-based projects but are mounted on platforms floated in freshwater bodies such as reservoirs, lakes, quarry lakes and industrial ponds.
According to new research commissioned by energy investor Bluefield, there is potential to build up to 58.6 gigawatts of capacity by 2050, enough to power millions of homes at peak sunny conditions.
Under the most ambitious scenario, the solar farms would cover approximately 33,500 hectares – about five times the area of Loch Lomond, Scotland’s largest freshwater lake.
They swear they won't touch the national parks and their pristine lakes.
RIGHT
...Experts and campaigners cautiously welcomed the plans but warned that protected natural landscapes such as the Lake District should be excluded.
It is understood that, under the current proposals, national parks would be considered inappropriate locations for floating solar farms.
However, the policy could still prove contentious in some rural communities where there is already a backlash against several large onshore solar and wind farms being built under Labour’s net zero rollout.
Richard Tice, the energy spokesman for Reform UK, described the plans as “another hare-brained folly proposed by the increasingly desperate Miliband”.
And it's not like the UK, particularly the northern tier, doesn't get some vicious hurricane-force winds whipping those gentle-looking ponds into dangerous watery maelstroms.
Like, what could go wrong?
A strong Storm damaged one of the largest floating solar panels in India. The farm has been in dispute since it disrupts local fishermen’s rights in Madhya Prades pic.twitter.com/3xIGRuuoVh
— The Maritime (@themaritimenet) May 5, 2024
Do we need any more proof that this government is completely bonkers? https://t.co/ZcV66EDmxk
— Nigel Betteridge 🇬🇧 (@Nigel_95) April 30, 2026
So, let’s recap:
- OFGEM want to spend £80 billion on upgrading the grid in the next five years, adding £9 billion to electricity bills.
- Expansion of intermittent renewable capacity to meet Net Zero targets will necessitate wasting billions of pounds worth of power, when it is too windy or sunny.
- Post 2030, tens of billions more will need to be spent to cope with increasing renewable capacity.
- Far from reducing bills, this never ending cycle of increasing renewable capacity/upgrading the grid will inevitably increase them.
Nobody in their right mind would have designed such a system. Unfortunately by the time of the next election, most of the damage will be irreversible.
Bonkers Britain.
