The bill: what it has cost the UK public, and what is still to come

Four figures

The sums, drawn to scale

Each bar is the same scale: £803bn is the full width. The bars overlap and are not added together. The investment figure includes the grid, and the public-finance figure counts lost tax as well as spending. Price years differ and are given in the tables below, where the source states one.

What the public has paid so far

Not in that total, because no single official figure for each is held here: the Feed-in Tariff scheme, the Capacity Market, the Renewables Obligation since March 2025, the carbon price paid by gas power stations and passed into bills, and the charges for the grid itself. Grid charges were £5.1bn in 2025-26. Each would raise the total.

The auditor on the bottleneck: "The majority goes to generators to increase output at short notice. These are mainly gas power stations in England, with costs linked to global gas prices. The remainder goes to generators to reduce output. These are often wind farms in Scotland." official, NAO

What it costs each year now

On a typical household bill of £1,641 a year in April 2026, £83 went to the transmission grid, up from £51 the year before, and £40 to balancing the system. official, NAO Ofgem forecasts the grid part alone at £104 by 2030-31, up from £44 in 2025-26, both in 2025-26 prices. Of the £51, £44 was for the onshore grid itself; the rest covers offshore connections and interconnectors. official

What is still to come

These rows overlap and are not added together.

What it has bought

On the cost per tonne. The figure counts the subsidy top-up only, not the price of the power. The scheme operator's avoided-emissions factor falls from 0.36 tonnes per megawatt-hour in 2016 to 2018 to about 0.11 since 2022, as the grid gets cleaner. Had the early factor applied throughout, the figure would be about £180 a tonne, below the government's central value. On the operator's own figures it is above it.

Where the money goes

How the official figures are presented

Each of these is a matter of record. None is a claim about anyone's motive.

1. The headline is the net figure. The gross is not added up.

   The Climate Change Committee's chapter on costs gives a cost of "around £4 billion per year". The same report says investment of "£26 billion per year" is needed. It does not state the 26-year total. Its own data sheet adds up to £670.1bn.

2. One policy, two official costs.

   The same OBR report gives two figures. The net cost "to the economy", £116bn in 2025 prices, is the Climate Change Committee's figure. The cost to the public finances, £803bn, is the OBR's own; two-thirds of it is tax no longer collected.

3. Prices are quoted in old money.

   Hinkley Point C's guaranteed price is quoted as £92.50 per megawatt-hour. That is in 2012 prices. The auditor puts it at £129 in 2025 prices. Beatrice's price was set at £140 in 2012 prices and is £205.70 now.

4. The headline cost of wind leaves out the system around it.

   The government's cost report puts out of scope, for every technology, "Wider system costs beyond those faced by the developer, and wider system benefits of deploying generation assets", which it says "cannot be assessed without whole power system modelling". The grid, the bottleneck payments and backup are billed separately.

5. Savings are measured against a worst case the policy itself creates.

   OfgemThe UK government regulator for gas and electricity, which sets how much network companies can charge billpayers. more › says grid upgrades will save a household £30 a year. The comparison is with bottleneck costs that, in the auditor's words, "assume that all planned renewable generation is added to the grid … regardless of whether the grid is ready to accommodate it". The grid charge on the bill still rises by £60.

6. Known risks are left out of the model.

   The 2010 assessment behind "connect and manage" did "not account for possible market power being exercised behind constrained boundaries, which was estimated to account for over half of constraints in 2008/09". The Climate Change Committee publishes no case in which fossil fuels are cheap. Its savings leave out fuel duty, which the OBR counts as lost.

7. Costs are withheld as commercially sensitive.

   The government's 2025 cost report publishes no nuclear figure: the costs "cannot be made available in this report because of their commercial sensitivity". Ofgem on early funding for three fast-track grid projects, December 2025: "For commercial reasons, ECF and PCF figures are not published at this stage and only percentages of budgets are published". No capital cost has been published for Shetland HVDCHigh Voltage Direct Current: the technology used for long subsea electricity cables, including the Shetland link. more › Link 2. See The missing figures.

8. Charges on bills are called levies, and counted as taxes.

   The OBR: "The government also taxes carbon more directly through environmental levies and taxes."

9. Price years shift inside one document.

   The auditor's text gives bottleneck costs "in 2024 prices". The note under its own chart says they were adjusted "to 2023-24 prices".

Forecast against what happened

The auditor's own finding: "DESNZThe UK government department responsible for energy policy, including subsidy auctions and community fund guidance. more › has allowed renewable electricity generation to expand faster than the grid, which has led to increased constraint costsMoney paid to a generator to switch off, or reduce output, because the grid cannot carry all the power it is producing. more ›. Successive governments' 'connect and manage' approach has allowed new generation projects to connect before the network was ready." official, NAO, September 2026

What this page does not claim

• The sums paid are gross. Wind and solar also push the wholesale price of power down when they are generating. No official estimateLabels on the evidence register showing how strong a figure's source is: an official document, a press report, arithmetic, or an estimate. more › of that effect is held here, so nothing has been taken off for it. The true net cost to billpayersAnyone who pays an electricity bill. Most of the costs on this site are recovered this way, not from taxes. more › is below the £97bn by an amount this page cannot state.
• Nobody can know what would have happened instead. The options and Wind or nuclear set out the alternatives at their documented costs, including their own overruns. They do not prove a different path would have been cheaper.
• Subsidy and investment are not added together. Investors put up the money to build. Subsidies and power sales pay them back. Adding the two would count the same pound twice.
• The forward figures are other people's forecasts. The £803bn, the £670bn and the £70bn are quoted as their authors give them. The table above sets earlier forecasts for other projects beside what happened.
• Price years are not converted. Each figure keeps the price year of its source. Where figures in different price years are added, the page says so.
• This is not a page about climate science. It takes no position on it. It asks what was spent, what it bought, and who was paid.

The detail