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UK Renewable Subsidy Tracker

An independent, open, data-driven audit of UK renewable electricity subsidy costs — every scheme, every pound, every counterfactual, every methodology exposed.

The UK runs eight distinct subsidy and levy schemes that together add tens of billions of pounds to consumer bills each year. This site tracks each of them — Contracts for Difference, the Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariffs, the Smart Export Guarantee, Constraint Payments, the Capacity Market, Balancing Services, and Grid Socialisation — to one standard: every chart reproducible from a single git clone, every number traceable to a regulator source, every methodology documented.

Current coverage: the Contracts for Difference and Renewables Obligation modules are shipped. Each remaining module ships as its scheme grid tile below — see the tile for the latest status.

Schemes

  • CfD dynamics preview

    Contracts for Difference — £29bn since 2015

    Ten years of strike-price commitments. £14bn premium over the gas counterfactual. 2022 gas-crisis test: CfD electricity still cost 7% more than gas even at crisis peak.

  • RO dynamics preview

    Renewables Obligation — £67bn since 2002

    The scheme you've never heard of, twice the size of the one you have. ~£6bn/yr forward-committed to 2037; the largest legacy renewables subsidy in the UK.

  • Feed-in Tariff (FiT)

    Coming in Phase 7. Domestic and small-commercial renewables tariff; 800k+ installs.

  • Constraint Payments

    Coming in Phase 8. The growing cost of paying wind farms to switch off when transmission capacity is saturated.

  • Capacity Market

    Coming in Phase 9. Capacity payments to dispatchable generation under EMR; modified methodology (no gas counterfactual).

  • Balancing Services

    Coming in Phase 10. Pre/post-renewables balancing-cost delta — the system-operability cost of high renewable penetration.

  • Grid Socialisation

    Coming in Phase 11. Best-efforts TNUoS attribution with low/central/high sensitivity bounds; the most uncertain cost bucket.

  • Smart Export Guarantee (SEG)

    Coming in Phase 12. Aggregate-only scheme page; no station-level data available from the regulator.

Explore by theme

The charts are organised into five argument themes:

  1. Cost — the mechanism: volume × price gap = bill. Starts with the four-panel diagnostic.
  2. Recipients — where the money goes. Six projects receive 50% of the pot.
  3. Efficiency — £/tCO₂ avoided against DEFRA SCC and UK ETS benchmarks.
  4. Cannibalisation — why wind crashes its own price, and who tops the difference up.
  5. Reliability — the drought periods no battery can cover.

For journalists and academics

Use our data — pandas, DuckDB, and R snippets + citation templates + SHA-256 integrity verification. Start at manifest.json and follow the URLs.

Status

Version 0.x prototype. Two scheme modules are shipped — Contracts for Difference and Renewables Obligation. The remaining six modules are sequenced in the project roadmap and will populate the grid above as they ship. Corrections and contributions welcome via GitHub Issues.