A north politician has urged critics to “kick the grid, not the windfarmers” over vast penalties regularly incurred by electricity customers.
His call follows a record payout of £3.1million to power companies for a single day earlier this month.
The cost, to be met by customers, was compensation for switching off turbines to avoid overloading the National Grid.
Sutherland SNP councillor Graham Phillips has called on governments on both sides of the border to speed up the expansion of the grid to tackle the problem.
He accepted that projects were underway to upgrade the transmission line from Dounreay to Beauly, but said more haste was needed.
He claimed a lack of devolved powers meant there was nothing the Scottish Government could do to preempt the problem.
“Kick the grid, not the windfarmers,” councillor Phillips said.
“The people who run the National Grid have been dragging their feet. If the grid can’t cope it should be made to.
“I have every sympathy for customers who are being overcharged rotten in Scotland, charged more per unit than anywhere else in the UK, partly because of grid charges.”
Mr Phillips is equally angry about the discrepancy in charges applied north and south of the border to grid connections.
He said: “The National Grid must change its charging structure because you can be charged £22 per megawatt hour to connect from up here, while if you build a power station in London the grid pays you to do it.
“It discriminates against regional generators and there’s an assumption that electricity generated in Scotland is not consumed in Scotland.”
A spokeswoman for the National Grid said the utility was currently investing £1billion on a Western Link that “would greatly enhance our ability to transport energy from Scotland to rest of Great Britain.”
A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: “A major programme of grid investment worth billions of pounds has been underway in Scotland for several years.
“As older power stations close and release capacity and £7billion of major upgrades are completed, it is expected the level of constraint payments will reduce.”
