Recently, David Turver posted a piece about 2025’s bumper year of Contracts for Difference (CfDs) in the UK. CfDs are top-ups offered to unreliable generators when the wholesale electricity is below their “strike price”, the usually generous rate that some dimbulb in the UK government offered them. Just occasionally, when the wholesale price is above the strike price, the unreliable generator is obliged to pay back the difference. Says Turver:
A record total of £2.64bn was paid out in subsidies across a range of technologies, but the largest recipient was offshore wind, taking over £2bn of the total.
Turver then presents the top ten recipients of these subsidies for 2025, of which 7 were offshore wind farms. I was interested to know where the money was going, so I spent this morning trying to find out. Here are the 7 wind farms in the top ten, in descending order of CfD subsidies received last year. (After an hour of searching, I discovered that the Crown Estate provides a list of owners on its website, here, which I then cut’n’pasted):
| Wind farm | Date commissioned | Cfd 2025 | Operator | Owner |
| Hornsea 1 | 2020 | £610M | Ørsted | 37.55% Ørsted; 25% Equitix and TRIG (The Renewables Infrastructure Group); 12.5% GLIL Infrastructure and Octopus (on behalf of NEST); 12.5% Greencoat UK Wind; 12.45% Brookfield |
| Walney Extension | 2018 | £341M | Ørsted | 37.55% Ørsted; 18.75% PFA Holding ApS; 18.75% PKA Holding ApS; 12.5% Octopus Renewables Funds; 12.45% Brookfield |
| East Anglia 1 | 2020 | £279M | ScottishPower Renewables | 60% Iberdrola (ScottishPower); 14.3% TRIG (The Renewables Infrastructure Group); 10% GIG (Green Investment Group); 10% Legal & General NTR Fund and Dev Bank of Japan; 5.7% InfraRed Capital Partners |
| Beatrice | 2018 | £231M | SSE Renewables | 40% SSE; 25% SDIC Power Holdings; 17.5% Equitix; 17.5% TRIG (The Renewables Infrastructure Group) |
| Dudgeon | 2017 | £225M | Equinor | 35% Equinor; 35% Masdar; 30% China Resources |
| Burbo Bank Extension | 2017 | £118M | Ørsted | 37.55% Ørsted; 25% KIRKBI Invest A/S; 15.7% Greencoat UK Wind; 12.45% Brookfield; 9.3% Greencoat Renewable Income LP |
| Neart Na Gaoithe | 2025 | £115M | Neart na Gaoithe Offshore Wind Limited | 50% EDF Renewables; 50% ESB |
Well, owners have owners of course, so I then searched the interwebs to find that out. The list below is in the same order as the wind farms above. There is a finite chance that the interwebs deceived me.
| Owner | Who owns the owner |
| Ørsted | Kingdom of Denmark 50.1%; Equinor 9.8% (Publicly traded) |
| Equitix | Tetragon (Guernsey); Hunter Point Capital (Private equity) |
| TRIG | Various, mutual funds etc |
| GLIL and Octopus | GLIL = Greater Manchester & London Infrastructure Limited = Pension Fund; Octopus privately owned |
| Greencoat UK Wind | UK, listed on LSE |
| Brookfield | Canada, listed on NYSE |
| PFA Holding ApS | Danish public pension fund |
| PKA Holding ApS | Danish public pension fund |
| Octopus Renewables Funds | Octopus privately owned |
| Iberdrola | Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund; BlackRock; Norges Bank |
| GIG | Macquarie Group, Australia, public |
| L&G and Dev Bank of Japan | L&G listed on LSE; DBJ, Gov’t of Japan. |
| SSE | Publicly listed. AI says top shareholders: BlackRock 8.55%; JPMorgan 5.89% |
| SDIC Power Holdings | Chinese Gov’t |
| Equinor | Gov’t of Norway 67% |
| Masdar | Abu Dhabi Gov’t |
| China Resources | Chinese Gov’t |
| KIRKBI Invest A/S | Denmark, Family of Kirk Kristiansen, LEGO |
| Greencoat Renewable Income LP | Various pension funds, including the Environment Agency |
| EDF Renewables | French Gov’t |
| ESB | Irish Gov’t |
It seems to me as if most of these millions are exiting the UK. Now, it might be the case that wind farms can’t afford to operate at wholesale price, and need the top-up that CfD provides to break even. If so, that is no good reason to “rely” on wind for a large chunk of generation. The snark quotes around “rely” are there because it cannot be relied upon when really needed.
Macquarie has been called a “vampire kangaroo” and drained Thames Water of cash, before selling up and buying Southern Water. (Wiki link.)
The wholesale price is likely to become more volatile as more unreliable generation is added, collapsing completely during gluts, and then skyrocketing when neither wind nor solar can deliver. On the whole, the former will predominate, as the unreliables proliferate. But the wind farms will still receive the CfD price they struck, index-linked of course.
Note also that there are other forms of subsidy, direct and indirect. This post only covers the 7 wind farms in the top ten recipients of CfDs in 2025.
Featured image: “More Pigs Than Teats” by James Gillray, via the Met, where you can read the names of his victims in this etching, most of whom are now long forgotten.
Climate Scepticism 
The balance of payments was once considered important. No longer, apparently. Now we send money abroad willy nilly and nobody seems to care less.
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I looked into ther question of foreign ownership of UK energy infrastructure more than 4 years ago:
https://cliscep.com/2021/09/28/where-power-lies/
This is a timely review of how those foreign companies are hoovering up subsidies under the disastrous CfD scheme. The situation certainly doesn’t seem to have improved in the intervening period.
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Andrew Montford of Net zero Watch has tweeted that offshore wind always undershoots its expected capacity factor. I wonder how it would affect these payouts if they came in on target?
https://x.com/aDissentient/status/1957354620377858496
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Jit, for completeness and to give some historical perspective, is it also relevent to recall your August 2021 article on the Dudgeon off-shore windfarm and its finances? :-
https://cliscep.com/2021/08/10/in-high-dudgeon/ Regards, John C.
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It is also possible to find out which companies provided services during construction, and which are contracted for maintenance. Of course, the post was long enough with only the wind farm owners as the topic. Let me just say that my glimpses into this subject did not show a preponderance of UK firms.
I had meant to reference “clean, home grown energy that we control,” or whatever it is that Miliband says. We do not want to be vulnerable to volatile (on a scale of months) oil and gas prices – instead we will trade that in for increasingly volatile (on a scale of hours) electricity prices. He is worried that we are dependent on dictatorships for our fossil fuels, but not apparently worried that ordinary bill payers are sending cash to the same dictatorships, or others, for supplying electricity at rates far above the wholesale cost.
Mark, thank you for reminder. What we need is for some anti “Big Wind” activists to maintain a live database, to save us the trouble.
Mike, I presume that if wind farms do well on capacity factor, then there will be two consequences. 1. The wholesale price of electricity will be lower at times because more electricity is available, and 2. The increased gap between the CfD strike price and the wholesale price will result in larger subsidies. There is presumably a consequence for constraint payments.
John, thank you for that reminder. I might have gone into that level of detail for the other six, but it seemed like hard work!
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Jit, I have always appreciated Cliscep’s subtitle, “joint ideas under construction”, as it allows for both the developemnt of ideas and for the recording of developments in the real world (such as the latest “strike prices”). Thus, although the site is not an ideal database (as per your “anti “Big Wind” activists to maintain a live database”) it has elements of that.
A good databse should be easily searchable. Is Cliscep sufficiently searchable? Or are there arguemnts that it should not be more searchable e.g. what is in the past should stay in the past.
Regards, John C.
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“UK to join major wind farm project with nine European countries”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp372d37gxgo
The UK is set to back a vast new fleet of offshore wind projects in the North Sea alongside eight other European countries including Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.
The government says the deal will strengthen energy security by offering an escape from what it calls the “fossil fuel rollercoaster”.
For the first time, some of the new wind farms will be linked to multiple countries through undersea cables known as interconnectors, which supporters say should lower prices across the region.
But it could prove controversial as wind farm operators would be able to shop around between countries to sell power to the highest bidder – potentially driving up electricity prices when supply is tight….
So we swap a largely imaginary “fossil fuel rollercoaster” for a very real renewables energy rollercoatser, which makes us increasingly dependent on foreigners (so much for energy security) and the prices go up, not down.
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On the plus side, it will never happen. Also on the plus side, if it ever did happen, I don’t see how it would be possible to provide it with all the sweeteners that the likes of East Anglia 1 get. Then the production would be out of sync with demand, and the wind farm would make no money.
Maybe that is pure hopium on my part, and they have figured out a way to make it worth the developer’s while.
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“Company hopes wind farm will power up to 1m homes”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd74j1n33p3o
…A new offshore wind farm has been given the go-ahead in the hope that it will power up to one million UK homes in the future.…
…The RWE project will sit next to the existing Galloper wind farm, which is also owned by an RWE-led consortium.…
…The development will span 28 sq km (49 sq miles) and be spread across two seabed areas.…
This is who RWE are:
Once founded at our group headquarters in Essen, we are now represented by subsidiaries in Japan, Sweden, America, China and many other countries
By the way, it’s interesting that the BBC footnoted the article thus:
Correction 26 January: The headline for this article has been amended to reflect that it is RWE’s claim that that the project will be able to produce sufficient energy for 1 million homes.….
Is it possible that the BBC is finally waking up to (valid) criticism of its previous reporting style, which simply glibly parroted whatever was contained in the press release sent to them by renewables companies?
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