Wind power has saved Britain £104 billion since 2010, says a new study from University College London — reported last week in the Guardian and presented to the public as established fact. The figure is precise, the methodology sounds rigorous, and the institution lending its name is one of Britain’s leading universities. The researchers even show their working: they’ve built a model, run the numbers, and arrived at a sum large enough to justify every subsidy, every planning battle, and every new offshore lease for the next decade. It is, in short, exactly the sort of evidence that ministers love to cite when defending renewable policy. There’s only one problem. The world described by this study — the one where wind turbines have delivered nine figure savings to British consumers — does not exist. It never has. Because the £104 billion wasn’t measured. It was imagined.
The study is not a peer reviewed paper, nor is it the work of UCL’s energy department. It is an unreviewed preprint uploaded to the university’s in-house site, written by a hedge-fund manager turned climate change master’s student, his hedge-fund colleague, and then bolstered by a UCL professor. Nevertheless, it has been enthusiastically promoted by the university’s press office and presented to journalists as fact. Yet when you examine how the £104 billion was conjured, it becomes clear that this number comes not from evidence, but from a model so detached from real markets that it collapses under its own assumptions.
The authors begin by performing an act of economic vandalism: they delete all wind generation across Europe. Not just Britain’s turbines, but every wind farm from Poitiers to Poznań. This on its own is a huge red flag for a paper titled “Modelling the long-term financial benefits of UK investment in wind energy generation”. They then imagine that every megawatt hour of lost wind power would be replaced by burning gas. By 2023, they calculate, this windless Europe would require an extra 273 million cubic metres of gas per day — more than the pipeline gas Europe lost when Russia turned off the taps in 2022. Having created this counterfactual catastrophe, they claim that the additional demand would have driven up gas prices across the continent, and that back in the real world where wind farms do exist, Britain avoided those higher prices. In their telling, wind didn’t just lower the price of electricity. It lowered the wholesale cost of gas itself.
To put numbers on this fantasy, they regress European gas prices against European gas demand from 2010 to 2021 and claim to find that every extra million cubic metres per day of demand raises prices by 0.4 per cent. They multiply this by the 273 million cubic metres per day of “missing wind” and declare that gas prices would have been roughly 56 per cent higher, on average, without renewables, and as high as 109 per cent higher in 2023. In crisis years like 2022, the formula predicts gas prices of £56 per MMBtu (Million British Thermal Units) — double what we actually paid on average during the war-driven price shock. Instead of accepting that their linear rule doesn’t hold under stress, the authors intervene. They write that they “conservatively” limited the price impact to £10 per MMBtu, roughly the average price after the crisis, and use that capped figure.
This is not analysis. It’s spreadsheet storytelling. They felt uncomfortable with the numbers in the scenario they are trying to simulate, so they step in, pick a ceiling that sounds reasonable, and press on regardless. This fantasy creates almost all of the claimed £133 billion in “gas savings”.
The second component of their headline figure, the £14.2 billion “saving on electricity”, comes from a different model: a regression of UK wholesale power prices on wind generation. They find that more wind tends to push down the day ahead of market price, which is already well documented. They remove wind from the data, calculate how high prices would have been without it, and multiply the difference by total demand. That produces the £14.2 billion. But once again, they count only the benefit and none of the cost. There is no mention of capacity market payments to keep backup gas stations online, of curtailment and constraint payments when the grid can’t handle excess wind, or of the billions spent on new transmission lines to connect remote wind farms to population centres. Once those costs are included, the short term “saving” likely vanishes altogether.
The paper does, to its credit, acknowledge that Britain has paid £43.2 billion in subsidies to wind generators between 2010 and 2023 through Contracts for Difference, Renewables Obligations and Feed-in Tariffs. Yet even on their own numbers, the UK spent £43 billion and got £14 billion back in cheaper electricity. The only reason the ledger ends up in the black is the £133 billion conjured from the gas price fantasy.
The hole in their logic starts with the decision to delete all wind from Europe in a paper supposedly about the UK. If you want to know what Britain’s wind farms actually saved, you need to ask what would happen if only Britain’s wind disappeared. UK wind makes up about 15 per cent of Europe’s total generation, so the extra gas demand would be roughly one-sixth of what they model. The resulting price shock across the continent would be far smaller, and so would any savings. By their own method, the saving would fall to around £20 billion — less than half the £43 billion we’ve paid in subsidies. That alone collapses the paper. And of course, the Guardian won’t be running a headline that says, “Wind farms cost £9 billion more than they save.”
Worse, the study assumes gas markets would swallow a demand shock equal to losing Russian pipeline supplies with no response. In the real world, higher prices bring more LNG cargoes, fuel switching, demand cuts, and the use of strategic reserves — the same adjustments we saw after Ukraine. Their model pretends none of this happens.
What makes this more troubling is how the study has been presented. The lead author, Colm O’Shea of COMAC Capital, is a hedge-fund manager whose investment company employs “Climate Researchers”. His co-authors are another COMAC employee and Professor Mark Maslin, a high-profile climate academic at UCL. Their preprint has not been peer reviewed, but UCL’s press office issued a statement describing it as “a new UCL study” and major outlets, including the Guardian, gave it credence. The result is a feedback loop where an untested thesis becomes a headline, and the headline becomes “evidence” in policy debates. By the time anyone notices the model doesn’t work, the £104 billion figure is already lodged in the public consciousness.
This matters because those debates shape real money. When ministers weigh whether to extend renewable subsidies, approve new wind farms, or impose grid charges on consumers, they rely on public understanding of costs and benefits. A claim that wind has already “saved the UK £104 billion” tilts that conversation dramatically, even though it rests on assumptions that would be laughed out of a first-year economics seminar. It provides political cover for policies that might otherwise face scrutiny, and it does so by presenting a work of modelling fiction as empirical truth.
In the real world, energy systems are messy, expensive, and governed by physics as well as economics
Wind has vastly increased costs in balancing, backup capacity, and infrastructure that this study simply ignores, and which are an ever-increasing part of our bills. Britain’s energy system is complex and interdependent. You cannot understand its economics by deleting an entire continent’s generation mix from a spreadsheet, watching your model push out unrealistic numbers, fixing it with an arbitrary cap, and pretending the result represents reality.
So yes, there is a world where wind has saved Britain £104 billion — a world where Europe’s turbines vanish overnight, where gas is the only alternative, where markets do not adapt, where grid costs do not exist, and where Britain captures savings from a continent-wide phenomenon by removing only a fraction of the wind generation used to calculate them. That world lives inside a UCL preprint and a handful of credulous news reports. In the real world, energy systems are messy, expensive, and governed by physics as well as economics. The only thing the £104 billion study truly demonstrates is how far from reality you can drift when you begin with the conclusion you want and reverse engineer the model to match.
