Britain is paying wind farm owners almost £180,000 an hour to switch off their turbines because there is nowhere for the excess power to go.
So-called constraint payments, where turbines are switched off to help balance the grid, have already cost £252m in the first two months of 2025.
This is up from £158m over the same period last year, market data shows - an increase of 60pc. The payments amount to £4.3m per day, or about £178,000 an hour, money which ultimately comes from energy bills.
The revelation adds to concerns about the state of the UK's creaking power grid as Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, pushes forward with an unprecedented expansion of wind and solar farms across the country.
Sam Richards, a former top government adviser who now runs campaign group Britain Remade, said: "Switching cheap wind power off when it's windy is costing bill payers, and the waste is spinning out of control - we reached the quarter of a billion mark twice as fast compared to last year.
"The Government needs to fix this urgently. Instead of wasting wind we should be letting cheap power cut energy costs directly to make it easier to build new factories or data centres. Paying for waste is just wrong."
Grid operators are forced to resort to constraint payments because of bottlenecks in the network of cables that move electricity between the north and south of Britain.
If a wind farm has an agreement to generate power but cannot do so because it would overload the grid, it is handed a constraint payment instead to reduce its output.
At the same time, another generator - often a gas plant - is asked to cover any shortfall elsewhere, in the part of the network where the power is needed. Because of the short notice, this is often far more expensive.
For example, on Friday afternoon £79,507 was spent on switching off wind turbines while £1.2m was spent buying energy elsewhere, according to the Wasted Wind website, which analyses Elexon market data.
Scotland's biggest offshore wind farm, Seagreen, was handed £65m alone to slash its output last year.
Critics including Britain Remade and Octopus Energy, the country's biggest supplier of household electricity and gas, have argued that the "staggeringly inefficient" setup is a result of the existing electricity pricing system, where wholesale power costs are the same in every part of the country.
This keeps power artificially cheap in areas such as the South East while skewing it higher in the North and Scotland.
By contrast, they have called for a regional electricity pricing system in which prices would be determined by supply and demand in each area.
Octopus has claimed bills would end up cheaper for everyone under this model because of the amount of wasteful spending that would be cut. Fewer pylons would also need to be built, the company says, as it would also encourage wind and solar farms to build schemes closer to major cities.
However, opponents including RenewableUK and SSE have warned this would create a "postcode lottery" and torpedo investment in wind farms that Mr Miliband needs to hit his clean energy targets on time.
The Government is considering a regional price system and has said it expects to make a decision later this year.
On Friday, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said curtailment payments to wind farms themselves had fallen 50pc compared to last year.
A spokesman said: "Neso takes its role to deliver a safe, secure and reliable national electricity network at least cost to consumers extremely seriously.
"We are constantly looking for new ways to reduce costs associated with balancing electricity supply and demand on a second-by-second basis, as these costs are passed on to consumers in their electricity bill."
In the 2023/24 financial year, the costs of constraint payments amounted for 2.4pc of a consumer bill, the spokesman said.
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said: "The National Energy System Operator's independent report shows we can achieve clean power by 2030 with cheaper electricity, even factoring in constraint payments, and a more secure energy system for Britain.
"Through our Clean Power Action Plan, we will work with industry to rewire Britain, upgrade our outdated infrastructure to get renewable electricity on the grid, and minimise constraint payments."