Without the hype
Contracts for Difference Map
Every Contract for Difference (CfD) the government has signed, on a 3D map of Great Britain. A CfD guarantees a generator a fixed price for its power, the strike price: when the market pays less, bill payers make up the difference, and when the market pays more, the generator pays the difference back. The map shows the 92 contracts paying now, the 23 on projects that are built but whose contracts haven’t started, and the 442 agreed but not yet built, from the settlement data of the Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC) to 3 November 2026, with each project placed from the government’s Renewable Energy Planning Database and The Crown Estate’s offshore wind lease areas. The CfD dashboard has the same payments as charts and tables.
Loading the map…
The map
Pick what the spikes show, the technologies and the year, or press Play to watch the contracts arrive. Striped spikes are not real yet: projects agreed but not built, or output and payments projected for future years. Drag to move the map and zoom in to see an icon on each project. Click a spike, an icon or a bar below the map to open it.
Some projects are built and generating but haven’t started their contracts. A generator can sell its power at market prices until its contract’s start date, and while prices are above its strike price it earns more that way. Seagreen, off the Angus coast, has generated since 2023, but its three contracts aren’t due to start until March 2027 and March 2028, and Moray West, generating since 2025, is due to start its main contract in March 2027. Until their contracts start, LCCC publishes no output for them.
Payments by year, and what they may cost
Payments rise with the strike prices and the number of contracts, and fall when the wholesale price rises. In 2021 and 2022, when gas prices pushed the wholesale price far above most strike prices, generators paid back more than £1.2 billion in today’s money, and in 2022 generators paid back more than they received. By the end of 2023 the offshore wind farms of the 2017 auction had paid back more than they had received. What the contracts cost from here depends on the wholesale price, which no one knows.
If power sells at a megawatt-hour, in today's money, from next year, the contracts will cost what the hatched bars show. Drag the underlined price to change it. It starts at the average of the last three years, ; the last twelve months averaged .
Net CfD payments by year and technology
The projection gives each running contract the output it generated over the last year, and each contract not yet running the output the government assumed when it set the budget for its round, until the contract ends. Wind and solar sell for less than the average price, because they generate most when power is plentiful, so the projection lowers their market price by as much as they have fallen short over the last three years. It ignores the rule in newer contracts that pays nothing in hours when the price is negative.
Output the grid turned down
When the grid can’t carry all the power wind farms could generate, usually from Scotland to England, the system operator pays some of them to generate less. A CfD pays only for power generated, so a contract pays nothing for this output, but bill payers pay for it through the Balancing Mechanism instead.
Output turned down by the grid, by year and technology
Every contract
Search, sort and click any contract to open it. Money is in today’s money, and “still to pay” uses the wholesale price set above.
How it works
Contracts and payments. The LCCC data portal publishes each contract’s output and payment for every day since it started (“Actual CfD generation and avoided GHG emissions”), and a register of every contract signed, with its capacity, round, status and expected start date (“CfD contract portfolio status”). A contract counts as running once it has a payment. Of the rest, a project counts as built when REPD lists it as operational under a CfD round, or when Elexon’s data shows the grid turning it down before its contract started; the others are agreed but not yet built, or ended before they started (LCCC’s “terminated”). A built project’s spike stands solid from the date REPD gives, or from the first time the grid turned it down. I add up the days with a payment to the generator as money paid out, and the days when the generator paid as money paid back, and bring them to today’s money with the ONS consumer price index (CPI), to the latest month published.
Where each project is. Onshore projects stand where the Renewable Energy Planning Database (REPD, the Q2 2026 extract) puts them. I matched each contract to its REPD record by name, allocation round, technology and capacity, and by hand where the names differ. Offshore wind farms sit in the middle of their lease areas from The Crown Estate and Crown Estate Scotland, with the areas drawn as outlines on the sea. A few projects missing from REPD but named after a town stand at that town, from GeoNames, marked approximate. Every contract, mostly solar parks from the latest rounds named only after a company; they are in every total and in the table.
What the spikes show. Each spike stands on a project, and spikes within 9 km of each other add up. A spike’s height is the square root of its amount, so a 30 MW solar park is visible beside a 1,300 MW wind farm; the numbers in the tooltip and the list below the map are the amounts themselves. Capacity counts a running contract from the month it started, a built one from when it was built, and an agreed contract from its auction, striped until it is built.
The projection. It uses the same assumptions as the lifetime-cost article: each running contract keeps its last year’s output until its term ends (15 years, or 20 for the 2026 auction’s wind and solar, with the two biomass conversion contracts, Drax and Lynemouth, ending in March 2027); each contract not yet running generates its capacity times the load factor the government assumed for its round, from its expected start date (or three months from now if that has passed); Hinkley Point C’s two reactors start in 2030 and 2031 at 90%. Strike prices are in today’s money, so the projection doesn’t depend on future inflation. The payment is that output times the strike price less the wholesale price you set, with wind and solar’s price cut to what they have fetched: offshore wind 91%, onshore wind 89% and solar 88% of the average day-ahead price over the last three years, taken month by month.
Output turned down. Elexon’s Balancing Mechanism data gives each wind farm’s accepted bids for every half-hour: the energy the system operator paid it not to generate, and what it paid. I matched the wind farms to their Balancing Mechanism units by hand. Where a contract covers only part of a farm (Dorenell, Seagreen, Moray West, Kirk Hill), its share of the bids follows its share of the capacity, and the totals leave out bids from before a contract started. Farms outside the Balancing Mechanism, most smaller onshore wind farms and every solar park, have no published curtailment, so the totals leave them out too.
What’s missing. Payments and curtailment are only part of what CfD generators cost the system. The page leaves out network reinforcement, other balancing costs and backup capacity, and it leaves out the value of the power and the carbon they avoid, beyond LCCC’s own avoided-emissions figure, shown for each project. The CfD cost comparison explains the payments in more detail. Data downloaded 13 November 2026; prepare.py in this page’s folder rebuilds it.