Britain will only back offshore wind farms that cut bills, Chancellor John Healey says
Britain will stop backing new offshore wind farms unless they can cut household energy bills, Chancellor John Healey said on Saturday, 31 October 2026. Under the new test, a wind farm will only win public support if the electricity it produces can actually reach homes and businesses without pushing up costs.
Healey set out the change in an article for The Times, three days after his Budget. He said new offshore wind projects bidding for subsidy contracts would only get the go-ahead if ministers were confident that all of the power they generate could be carried by Britain’s electricity grid without raising costs for consumers.
Newspapers have described the move as a veto on new offshore wind farms, but that word is the newspapers’ description, not Healey’s own. He did not announce a new legal power to block wind farms. What he announced was a change in how the government chooses which projects to support in its next renewables auction, the sale in which developers bid for the subsidy contracts that make big wind farms possible. Even so, it marks a change of tone from a government that promised to decarbonise Britain’s electricity by 2030: the priority now is cutting bills first.
At a glance
What happened: Chancellor John Healey said on Saturday, 31 October 2026, that new offshore wind projects bidding for subsidy contracts will only be approved if all of their electricity can be carried by the grid without pushing up costs for consumers.
Why it matters: Britain pays hundreds of millions of pounds a year to switch wind turbines off when the grid cannot carry their power, and the spending watchdog has warned the bill could reach 7.8 billion pounds a year by 2030.
What happens next: The new test will be applied in the next renewables auction, and details of a wider cost control framework are due at the 2027 spending review.
What the Chancellor actually said
Healey’s argument, in his own words, was simple. There is no sense, he wrote, in building power stations that cannot connect to the grid and then paying to switch them off.
“There’s no sense building power that can’t connect and then paying to switch it off,” he wrote. “We will take that approach into our next renewables auction, only buying projects that can lower bills while strengthening our energy security.”
He added that clean power “has to come at the right pace, in the right places, with the grid to carry it”. “This is not a retreat from clean power. It is the credible route to it,” he wrote. “We’ll be hard-headed about what we build,” he added.
Healey also said that without the renewable generation added in recent years, this year’s gas price shock would have hit families and firms even harder. “Those who want to rip up renewables would leave Britain more exposed to volatile markets and the dictators who exploit them,” he said.
Healey did not say which renewables auction he meant. The application window for the eighth round, known as AR8, closed in August, and the new rules were reported to be unlikely to affect projects already in that round, though they could shape the budgets set for it, which were due next month.
The problem: power with nowhere to go
To understand the announcement, it helps to understand the problem it is aimed at. Britain has built wind farms faster than it has built the cables needed to carry their electricity to where people use it. Much of the country’s wind power is generated off the coast of Scotland and in the North Sea, while much of the demand is in England, hundreds of miles away.
When the wind blows hard and there is not enough cable capacity to move the power south, the National Energy System Operator, known as Neso, pays wind farm owners to switch their turbines off, and pays gas plants and other generators to produce replacement power. Both sets of payments are recovered through energy bills, so households end up paying for electricity that was generated and then wasted, and for replacement power on top.
This is known in the energy industry as curtailment, or wasted wind. It is getting bigger as more wind farms are built and grid upgrades fall behind: wind farms have been allowed to connect before the upgrades they need have been carried out, and many of those upgrades have been delayed.
In September, the National Audit Office, the official spending watchdog, warned that homes and businesses could face a potential annual bill of 7.8 billion pounds a year by 2030 to deal with the problem. The charges for managing grid congestion are also predicted to add up to 100 pounds to energy bills by the end of the decade.
The pressure was underlined on Tuesday, 27 October, when a new single-day record of more than 47 million pounds was spent dealing with the grid being unable to cope with wind power, according to Wasted Wind, a tracker run by the supplier Octopus Energy: almost 7 million pounds to wind farm owners to switch off their turbines, and more than 40 million pounds to gas plants and other generators to replace the wind power. That figure comes from a campaigning tool run by a supplier rather than from an official statistic, so it should be read as an indication of scale rather than as a government number.
Why Scotland could be hit hardest
The new test is likely to matter most in Scotland, where the wind is strongest and the grid connections are least advanced, and where many of the biggest planned offshore wind projects sit, far from the main centres of demand in England.
Adam Bell, a former government energy official now at the consultancy PF Global, told The Times the government could potentially choose not to approve any Scottish offshore wind farms, where grid connections were less advanced, and could limit approvals in the next allocation round based on the grid upgrade schedule.
Bell suggested ministers might end up favouring wind projects that have later delivery dates, so that their power only starts flowing once the cables needed to carry it have been built. That would be a big change for developers who have already spent years and millions of pounds preparing Scottish projects, and it could slow the growth of clean power overall, even as it saves bill payers money in the short term.
A shift from the 2030 clean power pledge
The announcement is the latest sign that the government is softening its pledge to deliver 95 percent clean power by 2030, a target set by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary who drew up the plan.
In August, Miatta Fahnbulleh, who took over as energy secretary in July when Miliband became foreign secretary under Prime Minister Andy Burnham, told The Times the government would not stick rigidly to the pledge if it risked higher household bills. Fahnbulleh has said Britain faced an “affordability challenge” from the transition to net zero, and that the government needed to “keep people with us”.
Healey’s announcement fits the same pattern. He supports the approval of the Jackdaw gas field off the coast of Aberdeen, which was approved last week, and he supports approval of the Rosebank oil field west of Shetland.
Healey’s defenders say the shift is common sense: building wind farms that cannot deliver power to homes does nothing for the climate either, and the money wasted on switching turbines off could be better spent on cables and grid upgrades. Critics say the government is using the grid problem to slow down renewable energy, when the real answer is to build the grid faster, and that developers should not be punished for a bottleneck they did not create.
Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit organisation, told The Times the government did not have to choose between delivering power that was either clean or low-cost, because renewables delivered both. “Britain’s wind farms lowered wholesale power prices by around a third last year,” she said.
The wider Budget squeeze
The wind announcement followed Healey’s Budget on Wednesday, 28 October, which set out a new cost control framework for energy and cut more than 3 billion pounds from the energy department’s budget, with much of the saving redirected towards higher defence spending.
The Budget document commits the government to introducing a “comprehensive cost control framework” at the 2027 spending review “to ensure government action drives bills down over the next 10 years”. The principle Healey set out on Saturday, that the government will “only buy and build new generation projects that can connect to the grid and lower bills”, was already in the Budget. The Budget also removed 741 million pounds from the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which helps households replace gas boilers with heat pumps, and says 4.7 billion pounds of the Defence Investment Plan will be funded by “reprioritisation of capital budgets” across Whitehall departments.
That explains why the announcement landed when it did: the government is under pressure to show its energy policy is cutting bills, not adding to them, while households struggle with the cost of living. For households, a promise to stop paying for power that is generated and then thrown away is easy to understand. For the wind industry and for climate campaigners, the worry is that a test designed to save money in the short term will slow the building of the clean power Britain needs in the long term.
What happens next
How the new test will work in practice is not yet clear. Healey has not set out how ministers will judge whether a project can lower bills, or whether its power can be carried by the grid. Those details are due when the cost control framework is set out in full at the spending review in 2027.
In the meantime, the wind industry will be watching the next renewables auction closely. Developers will want to know whether projects with early delivery dates in congested areas will be passed over in favour of projects that can wait for cables to be built, and whether the new test applies only to offshore wind or to all renewable projects bidding for subsidy contracts.
Britain is in the middle of a huge programme of grid upgrades, with new cables and substations being built to carry power from windy areas to where it is needed. If those upgrades arrive on time, curtailment should shrink and more wind farms should pass Healey’s test. If they are delayed again, the test could bite harder and fewer projects will be approved.
Frequently asked questions
What did John Healey actually announce?
Healey said new offshore wind projects bidding for subsidy contracts will only be approved if ministers are confident that all of the power they generate can be carried by Britain’s electricity grid without pushing up costs for consumers. He set out the change in an article for The Times on Saturday, 31 October 2026.
Is this a veto on offshore wind farms?
Newspapers have described it as a veto, but that word is theirs, not Healey’s. He announced no new legal power to block wind farms. The change works through the government’s renewables auctions, where ministers choose which projects to support with subsidy contracts.
Why does Britain pay wind farms to switch off?
When the wind blows hard and there is not enough cable capacity to move the power to where people use it, the National Energy System Operator pays wind farm owners to switch their turbines off, and pays gas plants and other generators to produce replacement power. Both sets of payments are recovered through energy bills.
How much does wasted wind cost?
The National Audit Office warned in September that the bill for managing the problem could reach 7.8 billion pounds a year by 2030. The charges are also predicted to add up to 100 pounds to energy bills by the end of the decade. On Tuesday, 27 October, more than 47 million pounds was spent in a single day dealing with the problem, according to Octopus Energy’s Wasted Wind tracker, a campaigning tool rather than an official statistic.
Does this mean Britain is abandoning its 2030 clean power target?
The government has not formally dropped the target of 95 percent clean power by 2030, but Healey’s announcement is the latest sign that it will not stick to the pledge rigidly if doing so risks higher household bills. Healey insists the change is “not a retreat from clean power” but “the credible route to it”.
Will this affect wind farms in Scotland?
It could. Scotland has some of the strongest wind resources in Britain, but its grid connections are less advanced than in other parts of the country. A former government energy official, Adam Bell, said ministers could choose not to approve any Scottish offshore wind farms, or could favour projects whose delivery dates fall after new grid connections have been built.
What is a Contracts for Difference auction?
It is the sale in which the government awards subsidy contracts to renewable energy developers. Developers bid for a guaranteed price for the electricity they will produce, and the government buys power from the projects that offer the best value.
When will we know more?
The details of the wider cost control framework for energy are due at the spending review in 2027. Before that, the wind industry will be watching the budgets set for the next renewables auction, which were due next month.
Conclusion
John Healey’s announcement on Saturday was short and plain: Britain will not pay to build wind farms whose power cannot reach homes, and it will not pay to switch those turbines off. For a Chancellor under pressure to cut bills, it speaks directly to households who have watched energy costs climb and wondered why clean, cheap wind power has not made their bills cheaper.
Whether it is a sensible fix or a costly slowdown depends on what happens next. If the government builds the grid faster, the test could become a footnote, a brief pause while the cables catch up with the turbines. If grid upgrades are delayed again, it could become a brake, holding back the wind farms Britain needs to cut its reliance on gas and meet its climate goals. The wind itself is not the problem. Britain has more of it than almost any other country in Europe. The problem is what happens between the turbine and the plug socket, and until that gap is closed, the argument over Healey’s new test will go on.
This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.
Sources
- https://dailybusinessgroup.co.uk/2026/10/new-policy-may-curtail-scottish-offshore-wind-farms/ (Daily Business Group, 31 October 2026)
- https://www.ukfactcheck.com/article/561/healey-says-next-renewables-auction-will-only-buy-projects-that-lower-bills (UK Fact Check, 31 October 2026)
- https://www.labourhome.co.uk/john_healey_says_new_wind_farms_must_lower_bills_no_sense_building_power_that_cant_connect (Labour Home, 31 October 2026)
- https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2026/10/31/new-projects-risk-veto-as-chancellor-seeks-to-cut-bill-for-turning-off-turbines-when-grid-cannot-cope/ (Wind Watch, reproducing Oliver Wright, The Times, 31 October 2026)
