Scots windfarms paid cash to stop producing energy

[Piwoslaw]

Scots windfarms paid cash to stop producing energy - BBC News

The National Grid said the network had overloaded because high winds and heavy rain in Scotland overnight on 5 and 6 April produced more wind energy than it could use.

[...]

Dr Lee Moroney, planning director for the REF, which has criticised subsidies to the renewable sector in the past, said: "The variability of wind power poses grid management problems for which there are no cheap solutions.

"However, throwing the energy away, and paying wind farms handsomely for doing so, is not only costly but obviously very wasteful.

"Government must rethink the scale and pace of wind power development before the costs of managing it become intolerable and the scale of the waste scandalous."

[...]

[Mr Larque] also confirmed that the National Grid spent £280m balancing supply and demand.

A spokesman for the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), described the incident as "unusual" and said more electrical storage was needed.

He added: "In future we need greater electrical energy storage facilities and greater interconnection with our EU neighbours so that excess energy supplies can be sold or bought where required."

I wonder how much energy storage (in flywheels, for example) could be had for the a few hundred million pounds spent in one evening just to balance the grid's load?