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  "description": "This is not the same as the ‘waste’ of having spare gas or coal generators because they are despatchable and wind and solar are not.",
  "path": "/we-threw-renewable-energy-away-at-record-levels-last-year/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-29T01:30:02.000Z",
  "site": "https://goodoil.news",
  "tags": [
    "Joanne Nova",
    "AEMO QED 2025",
    "it on WattClarity,",
    "AEMO QED",
    "Reneweconomy",
    "JoNova",
    "CFACT"
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  "textContent": "Joanne Nova\n_A science presenter, writer, speaker and former TV host. Author of_ The Skeptic’s Handbook.\n\n### Careful, your subsidies are showing…\n\nThe more we make, the more we waste. The trend is clear and it’s so Soviet.\n\nSpring is the season with the most wasted renewable production, and each spring is more wasteful than the one before.\n\nAEMO QED 2025 \n\nThere are two sorts of “curtailment” where the generator has to shut off production. **Network curtailment** happens when a a transmission line is already at capacity, or a line is down. But **Economic Curtailment** is rapidly becoming the big drain. It occurs when there was such a glut of power that prices went negative. Generators were producing something so useless they had to pay people to take it away. Investors flee at this point. This is hidden under jargon called “Offloading” which sounds a bit like four-wheel driving with a lisp. I mean, they could have called it ‘toxic energy’.\n\nFrom the AEMO Q4 report\n\n> During Q4 2025, **total economic offloading of wind and grid-scale solar generation averaged 1,312 MW,** the highest quarterly average on record (Figure 45). This exceeded the previous peak set in Q4 2024 by 653 MW (+99%).\n>\n> Grid-scale solar economic offloading rose sharply, increasing from 343 MW to an all-time high of 618 MW (+275 MW, +80%). As a share of average grid-scale solar availability, offloading increased from 13% to 18%.\n\nSo nearly one fifth of all the electricity that solar panels produced was tossed in the bin. And about 15 per cent of wind turbine capacity. In South Australia an extraordinary 59 per cent of potential energy from solar was lost. In total, some 7.2 Terawatt hours of renewable electricity was thrown away last year, because it was made at the wrong time or in the wrong place. As Dan Lee describes it on WattClarity,\n\n> _”1 TWh is roughly equivalent to the entire production from Gladstone Power Station Unit 4 in 2025._\n\nSo we’re wasting about seven turbine units…\n\nIn the latest figures for the first quarter of 2026, the curtailment figures are back down again, but they are still higher than the same time last year. The inexorable rise of “curtailment” continues season by season.\n\nAEMO QED\n\nThis is not the same as the “waste” of having spare gas or coal generators because they are despatchable, and wind and solar are not.\n\nUnlike most things, as we make more wind and solar power generators they won’t get more efficient, not in a net production kind of way.\n\n#### REFERENCES\n\nAEMO QED\n\nSee also Reneweconomy\n\nThis article was originally published by JoNova and republished by CFACT.",
  "title": "We Threw ‘Renewable’ Energy Away at Record Levels Last Year",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-29T01:30:02.276Z"
}