UK ‘Renewable’ Subsidies Rise To £657 Million
The British government’s Low Carbon Contracts Company, LCCC, has just updated the costs of the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme for Q3. This is the scheme which hands out subsidies to wind farms and biomass plants
The subsidy cost between July and September 2025 totted up to £657.7 million, all of which is added to our electricity bills.
The cost for the last four quarters was £2.4 billion, equivalent to over £80 per household. The details are shown in the chart below:
Source: https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/resources/scheme-dashboards/cfd-historical-data-dashboard/
Most of the subsidies go to wind farms, £502 million last quarter. Much of the rest is paid to Drax to subsidise their burning of trees.
CfDs guarantee an index-linked strike price to ‘renewable’ generators – if the price they earn on the market for selling electricity is lower, the Government pays a top up subsidy. If market prices are higher, the generator pays the difference to the Government.
As the above graph shows, the only time when generators paid back was during three quarters in 2021/22, at the height of the Ukraine war energy price spike.
Since the scheme began in 2016, subsidies have totalled £11.3 billion.
The LCCC dashboard also includes the average market price for each quarter. In Q3, this was £69.83/MWh, which compares to an average strike price of £151.85/MWh.
In other words, we are paying more than double the market price to ‘renewable’ generators under the scheme.
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Average Market Prices for Electricity
Older ‘renewable’ generators, which began operations before the CfD scheme came into being, are still being paid subsidies via the Renewables Obligation scheme.
In the Financial Year ended March 2025, these subsidies cost bill payers £7.2 billion, equivalent to £96/MWh. Two thirds of them subsidies go to wind farms.
Again, renewable generators receive these subsidies over and above whatever they can sell their electricity for. At current prices the Renewables Obligation subsidises have cost bill payers £89.6 billion since 2010.
In other words, the two schemes have cost us more than £100 billion.
Smaller ‘renewable’ generators receive special Feed-in Tariffs, rather than direct subsidies. These are just subsidies by another name and cost another £1.8 billion in 2024.
In short, we are currently paying £11.4 billion a year to subsidise ‘renewable’ energy.
And this does not even take into account all of the indirect costs imposed by the intermittency of wind and solar power.
No wonder our bills are the highest in the world.
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