Utility Week

12 | MAY 2022 | UTILITY WEEK Renewables Analysis Making fans of wind turbines Octopus Energy's Fan Club offers local communities cut-price electricity in return for hosting wind turbines – and the company says they're lining up to sign on. A s Storm Eunice swept in from the Atlantic at the beginning of the year, cutting power to more than a million homes, the dark clouds had a small silver lining: on the wholesale power market there was some brief respite from the high prices that had characterised the winter as wind generation reached a new peak. Of course, the drop in wholesale prices won't have been noticeable to the vast major- ity of consumers, even those who can see wind turbines from their window, most of whom pay a flat rate for their energy. Octopus Energy, which last year announced the creation of a renewable gen- eration arm as well as a new type of tariff, is looking to change this. The Fan Club tariff launched in January offers smart meter customers living within 5km of one its turbines a 20% discount on their electricity whenever they are spinning and 50% off when the wind picks up and output is high. The Fan Club is at the heart of Octopus's proposals to government to streamline the planning process for onshore wind by high- lighting the groundswell of support in cer- tain areas. While largely ignoring onshore wind in its Energy Security Strategy, the Department for Business, Energy and Indus- trial Strategy did hint at its acceptance of this approach when it referenced consulting on developing partnerships with "a limited number of communities" to host onshore wind farms in return for guaranteed lower energy bills. For the time being, Octopus has just two 500kW turbines, at Caerphilly in South Wales and Market Weighton in Yorkshire. Zoisa North-Bond, chief executive of Octopus Energy Generation, says the com- pany deliberately acquired turbines close to towns and villages because "we wanted to understand how much people cared about them". The company sought to answer the ques- tion: "If you have a wind farm on the side of your village and you can get as much as 50% off your bill for using energy at all the right times, does that change people's opinions as to what renewables look like?" North-Bond says Octopus is trying to create an alternative to the current develop- ment model for renewables whereby colossal "industrial-sized" turbines are built in loca- tions where the wind is strongest – mainly in the north of the UK. The power from these "nameless" tur- bines is sold on the wholesale market and fed on to the national grid so it can be trans- mitted hundreds of miles across the country. Speaking before the government's release of its Energy Security Strategy, North-Bond

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