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Did you know that Jackdaw (a gasfield in the North Sea, discovered by Shell in 2005 and first proposed for development in 2020) is expected to generate around £1.5 billion in tax revenue for the Treasury over eleven years?
Yet, in just twelve months, the UK wasted the same amount by paying renewable generators to turn off their power rather than feed it into the grid.
Last year, the UK paid £380 million to wind farm operators to stop generating electricity. It then went further and paid an additional £1.08 billion to fire up gas power stations, to replace the electricity those windfarms had just been told not to make.
Total: £1.46 billion. In one year. Up from £1.23 billion the year before.
It was the UK taxpayers, who actually paid for this. This cost is bundled inside the part of the energy bill called 'balancing costs', which is why you have never seen a separate line item for it.
Most of the UK’s renewable generation is in Scotland and the North Sea, an area known for their wind projects. Unfortunately, most of the UK's actual electricity demand is in England, mainly concentrated in London and the south. Between Scotland and England, we have the transmission cables, and they are, sadly, too thin to carry the power to down south when the wind is strong.
Whenever this happens and wind production is too high, the grid operator has to deal with two problems at the same time. We have too much (renewable) electricity in the north, not nearly enough in the south, and no good wires able to fix the mismatch. So, the grid operatior actually has to pay Scottish wind farms to turn down, which is called a constraint payment (curtailment). The grid operator then has to go around and pay gas plants in the South (closer to the demand) to turn up. And as we established, both payments land on us, the consumers.
Roughly 95% of all curtailed wind in Britain is Scottish. There's one wind farm alone, Seagreen off the Angus coast, that had 2.7 terawatt hours of generation turned away in 2025. That is enough electricity to run a million homes for a year, from equipment already built and already paid for, but it was asked (and paid) to not be used.
2026 has been even worse so far. By the end of September the curtailment payments had already passed £1 billion. Octopus Energy, which tracks this, estimates it could reach £8 billion a year by 2030 if nothing is done to fix this.
On 21 October the government approved production at the Jackdaw gas field, 150 miles east of Aberdeen, operated by Adura, the Shell and Equinor joint venture.
Jackdaw has been approved before. It was consented in 2022, then turned down by the Court of Session after a Supreme Court judgment established that ministers must account for the emissions from burning a fuel, not only from extracting it. It was then reassessed, and approved again.
So all in all it has taken four years, a Supreme Court judgment, a court ruling in Edinburgh, a re-done environmental assessment and an updated decision from a new energy secretary to get a single gas project over the line. Nobody could accuse the authorities of making life easy for Jackdaw.
The case made for it is the one anyone can expect: energy security, domestic supply instead of imported energy, jobs, an tax revenue. Jackdaw will raise UK gas production by about 6 % at peak, which is around 2% of total UK gas demand, for up to eleven years.
Let’s put the two numbers next to each other
Wood Mackenzie estimates Jackdaw could generate around £1.5 billion in tax receipts for the Treasury. The government claims £2.9 billion contributed to the UK economy. Those are lifetime figures (or around eleven years).
Curtailment cost is £1.46 billion in just twelve months.
So the entire tax take from the UK's Jackdaw project, spread across more than a decade, is around the same of what the country has wasted in a single year because the cables between Scotland and England are too small.
Related to job security, the current gap between the claim and the paperwork is also worth having a look. Shell's submission says that Jackdaw safeguards 300 jobs at the Shearwater hub and supports more than 1,000 across its supply chain. Peak construction employed around 3,500 people, and that phase is already done. Safeguarded is not the same word as created.
I am not arguing that the Treasury will take gas money from Jackdaw and then it will use it to switch off wind farms. It does not work like that. Constraint payments reach you through levies on your bill. Jackdaw's receipts go to the Exchequer.
The comparison I’m using is actually about attention and efforts.
Jackdaw consumed four years of legal, political and regulatory endeavours. And it will unfortunately not lower your bill. Its emissions, up to 36 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent over its life, amount to no more than 1.32% of any single UK carbon budget, which is what allowed the minister to approve it. It was small enough to approve. It is also small enough not to change very much on either direction.
Curtailment gets no court cases, no front pages and no protesters outside the department. It costs more, every single year, it is rising, and no one is talking about it.
Donella Meadows, a pioneering environmental scientist, who thought more than most about how to change a system, ranked the places you can intervene in one. At the bottom of her list, the weakest places to push are the numbers: taxes, subsidies, how much of something flows through. Near the top, the places in the system that will enact the most powerful changes are the rules, the information flows, and who gets to decide what.
If we look at it this way, approving another gas field is a change to a number. It helps adjust supply by a couple of per cent and leaves every structural feature of the system exactly as it was.
On the other hand curtailment is a rules and information problem: who is paying when the wires are full, whether the price of electricity reflects where you are standing when you use it, whether new demand (from data centres to electrolysers to heat pumps), is encouraged to be located where the power already is. Those points sit much higher up the leverage point list, and that is where the money is.
The regulator has approved around £70 billion of high-voltage network upgrades over five years, which will add around £60 to the average bill by 2030 (and this is the right thing to do).
Alongside Jackdaw, the government announced an Energy Wealth Fund to channel the revenue from the North Sea into low-carbon projects, starting with £2 billion. If we compare it against a £70 billion rewiring programme, £2 billion is not really a plan. I see it as a press release with a number attached.
Jackdaw gas is probably going to displace imported LNG, instead of creating entirely new demand. This means its net impact on global emissions is smaller than the headline may suggest. That's, of course, a fair point and it may be one of the strongest.
At the same time, money is not the main constraint on expanding the grid. Planning consent, supply chains and construction time are.
Both points are worth bearing in mind when making the comparison. But unfortunately, neither will turn Jackdaw into a climate win.
A real win would be getting transmission infrastructure built without spending years stuck in planning battles and legal challenges. It would mean having an electricity market that reflects where power is actually generated, so we stop paying to switch off some of the cheapest electricity in the country. And it would also mean encouraging new industries to set up in Scotland, where much of that electricity is being generated, rather than continuing to concentrate investment in the south.
The UK has spent the best part of four years arguing about a gas field that represents around 2% of their gas supply, yet barely seem to talk about the £1.46 billion they have effectively wasted in just a year, because they cannot get the electricity they already generated to where it is needed.
I find that a bit difficult to understand. If we're serious about energy security, affordability and the transition to net zero, surely this is where much more of our attention should be.
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