About this site

Renewables are cheap. That is the official story, told by ministers, regulators and the industry. The subsidy bill tells a different one: subsidising renewables has cost over £220 billion in today's money since 2002, including estimated indirect costs — more than £105 billion of it in direct, measured payments to generators — collected from you three ways: on your electricity bill, in your taxes, and in the prices charged by every business paying the same levies.

Nobody publishes that running total. The figures are public — LCCC, Elexon, Ofgem, HMRC and NESO publish them all — but in separate places, in industry units, and no official body adds them up.

This site does. Official records, converted to pounds at the official prices, updated daily. Every figure traces to its source; the full method is on the methodology page. The ticking counter is a labelled estimate between data releases. The totals beneath it are not.

The British government audits its money: the Office for Budget Responsibility checks every Budget against reality. The government does not audit the levies on your electricity bill. Until it does, this is a citizen’s version of that bookkeeping.

Built and self-funded by Richard Lyon, author of The Energy Trap (Swift Press, 2026). No advertising, no sponsors. Contact: turn on JavaScript for the email address.

With thanks to David Turver, whose Eigen Values is among the most thorough independent accountings of the cost of UK energy policy. The named-station Renewables Obligation figures and parts of the transmission-charge series build on public datasets he reconstructed; each is cited where it is used on the methodology page. How those datasets are combined here, and any error in the result, are mine.

If you find an error in a published figure, I want to know: confirmed errors are corrected and logged in public on the corrections page.

Journalists: figures on this site may be quoted with attribution; I'm available for comment.

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