Wasted Wind Tracker Scotland

Right now. Every five minutes the tracker reads each Scottish wind farm’s Physical Notification (the output it told the grid it expected to produce) and the latest Bid-Offer Acceptance from National Grid’s control room for the current half-hour. Where an instruction has set a wind farm below its notified output, the gap is counted as power held back.

Daily totals. Each day’s figure adds up the settled bid acceptance volumes (Elexon’s BOAV data) for the monitored wind farms. The cost is the sum of Elexon’s indicative bid cashflows (EBOCF) for the same wind farms: what was paid to them, net, for turning down. Settled data arrives about a day after each half-hour, so the latest full day is usually the day before yesterday. A paler bar marks a day that is still filling in.

Homes. Comparisons use Ofgem’s typical household electricity use of 2,500 kWh a year (in force from 1 July 2026). That is about 6.8 kWh a day, or an average demand of 0.29 kW.

What this leaves out

• It’s a lower bound. It counts only grid instructions to transmission-connected and other Balancing Mechanism wind units in Scotland, and not wind farms that curtail themselves or smaller farms on the local distribution network.
• The cost covers payments to the Scottish wind farms only. It excludes the cost of turning other power stations up to replace that energy, which adds substantially to total constraint costs.
• Settlement figures can be revised after first publication.

Which wind farms are included

Loading the list of monitored wind farms…

A unit is included when Elexon’s register lists it as wind and either places it in the North or South Scotland grid supply area, or gives it a Scottish transmission loss zone. The list rebuilds itself from Elexon’s register, so new wind farms are picked up automatically.

See every monitored unit