🧃The Great Energy Traffic Jam

Welcome to The Strawman, the daily climate newsletter that’s like a wind turbine in a storm—always spinning, occasionally overpowered. Today, we’re talking about a bizarre problem in the renewables world: green energy is getting switched off. Not because we don’t need it, but because our power grids are struggling to keep up. It’s like having an all-you-can-eat buffet but being forced to throw away half the food because the plates are too small.

Wasted Watts: Why Green Energy is Getting Switched Off

It turns out that when the wind blows hard or the sun shines bright, we don’t always have the infrastructure to use that energy. Across Europe, wind and solar farms are being told to hit the brakes because there aren’t enough power lines or storage solutions to handle the electricity they generate.

Britain’s wind power curtailment (a fancy way of saying "shut down because the grid can’t handle it") hit almost 10% last year, while Northern Ireland wasted a whopping 30% of its wind power. Even China—where grid expansion is happening at a mind-boggling pace—is seeing wasted solar and wind energy climb above 3%. The problem? Our electricity systems weren’t built for the unpredictability of renewables, and they’re struggling to adapt.

The Gridlock Problem: Too Much Power, Nowhere to Go

In many cases, wind farms are in the wrong places. Scotland, for example, produces most of the UK’s onshore wind power, but its power lines to England are too limited to carry all that clean electricity south. The same problem exists across Europe, where power-hungry cities are far away from the wind and solar farms that generate the energy.

This mismatch has led to record volatility in energy prices. In 2024, there were nearly 5,000 hours of negative electricity prices across Europe. That means producers were literally paying customers to use their power—because the alternative was shutting down entirely. Meanwhile, grid operators are spending billions to balance the system, sometimes paying fossil fuel plants to ramp up production in one area while shutting down renewables in another. It’s a mess.

Storage Wars: The Race to Catch and Keep Renewable Energy

The solution seems simple: store the extra energy for later. But large-scale energy storage isn’t as easy as throwing some AA batteries into a wind turbine. While battery capacity is set to grow fivefold in Europe over the next five years, it’s still nowhere near enough to handle all the excess power.

Investment is pouring into energy storage—$54 billion last year alone—but it’s still playing catch-up. Meanwhile, governments are scrambling to redesign electricity markets, potentially introducing zonal pricing to encourage people to use green energy when it’s available. Until then, the energy industry will continue playing a game of renewable whack-a-mole—desperately trying to store, transport, or just stop the flow of clean electricity when the system gets overwhelmed.

The Takeaway

Renewables are growing faster than our grids can handle, and we’re literally throwing away clean energy because we don’t have the infrastructure to store or move it. Until we fix that, the world’s energy transition will be less of a smooth ride and more of a chaotic traffic jam.