Ah, so wind power's not so cheap then, eh?

Back the drawing board then, eh?

Energy bills will rise £200 a year within a decade to pay for wasted wind power as new turbines in Scotland are paid to switch off, according to new forecasts.

Poor electricity grid infrastructure means energy created by turbines in Scotland cannot reach homes in England on very windy days.

Last year Britain wasted enough wind power for a million homes, but new turbines built over the next decade would see that figure grow fivefold by 2030, according to think tank Carbon Tracker.

The cost to pay wind farms to switch off at these times and buy gas to fill in the shortfall would rise to £3.5 billion a year, according to Carbon Tracker’s analysis. That would add an average of £200 to annual household energy bills.

Once we add in dispatchibility and transmission costs then wind isn’t so cheap. But then we all know that already, even if the others haven’t grasped it as yet.

The much more interesting part of this is something more meta.

The problem has been blamed on bottlenecks in the planning process which can take up to seven years for major new electricity cable projects.

Think on this. The same people who are insisting that we’ve got to entirely redesign the whole economy - or, the milder ones, the entire power sector - are likely the same who insist we’ve got to have lots and lots of planning. The planning being the thing which obstructs the ability to do that redesign of course. For the one thing the planning permissions sector does is make it damn near impossible to do anything different. But the whole point of the redesign is that everything must be done different.

That is, the last 30 years of planning law is what is making it so difficult to carry through the plans of the past 30 years.

There is one theory of history which states that every society starts out vibrant and active and this lasts until it drowns in its own bureaucracy. At which point the fall and the rise of a new civilisation. Given that we do actually know this is possible we suggest, ever so gently, that perhaps we could - should - short circuit this process and instead drown our own bureaucracy?