Timeyin Akerele

There used to be a bit more, but the Chancellor decided in 2025 that from April 26, a big chunk of those old renewable costs, renewable subsidies, should be taken off of bill payers and put into exchequer funding.

So essentially taxpayers pay for 75% of that.

The money still has to be paid, right?

These are contracts that still need to be paid.

But it's no longer coming from people's energy bills.

It comes from the tax revenues that government take instead.

And we can get into this in more depth.

So once you build a solar panel or a wind farm, it's actually pretty cheap to run it.

But the capital cost of setting it up still needs to be recovered by the company that built it.

That has required, in the early days, when the technologies were new, they were quite expensive.

So some of those old, that's renewable obligation costs.

Some of them are quite high costs.

But as I say, the exchequer, the chancellor, has taken a big chunk of that off of people's energy bills.

Then the prices got much cheaper as the technologies matured.

They've gone up a bit again recently, but...

Basically, you're right that the more of this we build, the less gas we need to use.

And therefore, what we call the wholesale price, which is the market price of electricity on any given day, that will be lower if there's more

wind and solar power generating.

Particularly if it's enough for the whole country, then the price goes much lower because we don't need gas on the system.

And it's gas that otherwise sets that marginal price, that wholesale price.