Blown Away by Government Madness

You couldn’t make it up. The government that blew with the public wind—shouting about the race to renewables, patting itself on the back for wind energy leadership—somehow forgot one minor detail:

You can’t just generate power. You need to move it.

That’s the absurdity we’re now paying for. Scotland, blessed with powerful winds and a landscape fit for turbines, now routinely finds itself generating clean electricity only to be told: “Switch it off.” Not because it’s not needed. But because we can’t get it to where it is needed.

The national grid—the arteries of our energy system—isn’t fit for purpose. It was built for a different age, one where coal stations sat near big cities and nuclear plants quietly churned in the background. It was never reimagined for a world where remote wind farms would be our lifeline.

So what happens?

We pay the wind farms not to generate. Then, just to compound the madness, we pay gas plants in the south to switch on instead, because we can’t move the clean power from north to south.

Let that sink in:

• Billions invested in wind.
• Clean, free energy going to waste.
• Taxpayers footing the bill twice—once to turn turbines off, and again to fire up fossil fuels.

This isn’t a failure of technology. The tech is there. It’s a failure of imagination. Of strategy. Of government.

The great renewable rollout was never going to work on PR alone. You need wires. Storage. Smart systems. Political courage. And frankly, some common sense.

Instead, we got an energy policy that stops at the photo op. And a public that’s now paying the price—not just financially, but in missed opportunity.

The transition to renewables is not just desirable—it’s essential. But if we don’t build the infrastructure to match the ambition, all we’ll do is create another system of waste, inefficiency, and dependency.

That’s not a green revolution. That’s just more of the same, painted a different colour.