Timeyin Akerele

And on a day with wind, lots of wind, maybe we don't need any gas at all except just a little bit to balance the system.

So we've – over time, it can work.

Now, there's – the government –

looked at this um their review of ng market arrangements and they looked at whether it was worth making changes and it's worth looking at those documents because they concluded actually it wasn't worth making changes because the market was moving quite quickly to a position where gas would set the price less and less so i said it's about two-thirds of the time it used to be 90 percent of the time and that's just a few years ago and it will come down to 50 or less by 2030 so we're getting to a world where this matters less and if the gas price is low

or even medium, it doesn't have much of an effect either.

So it's only at times when the gas price is high where people rightly say, is this fair?

And you can go, hmm, not sure about that.

And so the government can step in and, in fact,

The government has also announced they are looking at whether they should change the way some of those contracts operate, particularly for some of the older renewables, to reduce that sort of, if you like, excess profit they're making at the moment.

But as I say, the windfall tax in energy has also taken some of that excess profit away.

But contracts for difference, which is the vehicle by which the government's been buying renewable power, wind and solar, since the mid-2010s, those contracts...

are fixed price for the generator.

So actually that gas point doesn't apply.

So when gas prices are high, the owners of those contracts essentially pay back money to consumers.

So let's say that gas price is 100, but they had signed a contract, a contract for difference at 50 pounds.

They would be, they're in the market, so they get that 100, but it basically comes back to consumers.

because they've signed a contract for 50.

So they only keep 50 pounds.

Now the converse of that is if the market price is down at 30 or 40, they get a top up.

So there's a bit of subsidy element.