Wasted wind power will add £40 to the average household bill this year with estimates showing that will rise to £150 a year by 2026.

The Carbon Tracker's findings come in the wake of the government's plan to reduce the time it takes to build new grid infrastructure.

Currently, when it is windy, the grid is unable to handle the extra power being generated. Wind farms are then being paid to switch of while gas-powered stations are paid to fire up.

The overall cost of this is then passed on the consumers.

Solving the problem 'not even that expensive'

The tracker said that the main problem in getting electricity to where it is needed is a bottleneck in transmission between Scotland, where half of the UK's onshore wind farms are, and South-east England, where the most electricity is used.

"There are not enough cables", said Lorenzo Sani, analyst at Carbon Tracker.

"The logical solution would be to build more grid infrastructure," he added. "It's not even that expensive."

The queue for grid connections currently contains hundreds of projects that could generate almost 400 gigawatts of electricity — more than twice as much as is forecast to be needed to meet the government’s goal of decarbonising the power system by 2035.

However, many are the result of speculative applications or stalled developments; up to 70% of projects in the queue do not materialize.

The UK Government's new system is designed to overhaul the way connections are awarded and to support projects that can deliver at speed.

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