Britain funds the wind farms. SSE and Equinor bank the profits.

On 1 July, Ofgem’s new price cap pushed the typical household energy bill to £1,663 a year, a 13% rise. Bills are now 53% higher than they were in the winter of 2021/22. More than 6.1 million UK households are in fuel poverty. Household energy debt stands at a record £4.79bn, with almost 2 million customers behind on payments and no plan to catch up.

Three days later, the Guardian published a data analysis showing Britain is in the middle of the fastest renewables buildout in its history. The Labour government has approved wind and solar projects at double the rate of its predecessor. Seven hundred new wind, solar, hydro and battery projects have been given grid connection dates before 2030 since January. Renewables are on course to supply more than 70% of Britain’s electricity within a few years.

Put those two facts side by side and there is an obvious question the corporate press keeps stepping around: if the country is building all this cheap power, why do bills keep going up? The answer is that the public is building the wind farms and a small number of energy companies are keeping the money.

The same week, record profits

In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the global energy industry posted £26.2bn in profit. Around £3bn of that came from UK operations, equivalent to £102 in profit per UK household in three months, according to the End Fuel Poverty Coalition.

SSE, which owns the Viking and Dogger Bank wind farms, posted record profits for the year, with renewables earnings up 25% to just over £1bn and network profits up 53%. The company raised its dividend by 7%, to 64.2p a share. Equinor, the UK’s biggest gas supplier, reported adjusted operating income of £7.19bn for the first quarter, up 13% on the year, with net income more than doubling. Shell’s adjusted first-quarter earnings came to £5.07bn, more than double the previous quarter.

“Around a quarter of every energy bill is taken in profit by a range of firms involved in the industry,” said Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition. “While households face another bill rise in July and millions remain trapped in fuel poverty, the companies that control our energy supply are cashing in.”

Why cheap wind doesn’t mean cheap bills

The mechanism is not a mystery, and it is not an accident. Britain’s electricity market sets the wholesale price using the cost of the most expensive generator needed at any given moment, which is usually a gas plant. That means even when wind is producing power for a fraction of the cost, it gets sold at the gas-set price. Gas still determines the price for roughly six in ten hours of the year, down from over 90% in 2021 but still the dominant factor.

Some wind and solar generators built under older Renewables Obligation contracts collect that gap between what it costs to produce the power and what gas-fired electricity would have cost, as a straightforward windfall. Reforming this, by splitting the country into regional pricing zones so cheap renewable power is priced closer to where it is generated, was on the table last year. The government dropped the zonal pricing plan in July 2025 after sustained lobbying from industry, keeping a single national market that continues to let gas set the price almost everywhere.

Ofgem’s own explanation for July’s 13% rise is that wholesale gas prices jumped 28% over three months, driven by the conflict in the Middle East. That is true, and it matters: this rise was not itself an act of wind-farm profiteering. But it is also the whole point. After the fastest renewables rollout in British history, a war on the other side of the world can still add hundreds of pounds to a British household’s bill, because the market has been left structured so that gas, not the cheapest power actually on the grid, decides what everyone pays.

Public risk, private reward

The pattern is familiar because it is the same one that ran through the privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s. The public sector does the expensive, risky work of building infrastructure, in this case through planning reform, guaranteed grid connections and Contracts for Difference that de-risk investment for developers, and private companies collect the returns once the asset is generating.

Great British Energy, the public company set up to change that equation, was capitalised with £8.3bn. £2.5bn of it has since been reallocated to small modular nuclear, leaving roughly £5.8bn for the renewables mission it was created for. SSE says its own £33bn investment programme depends on the returns it currently earns. That may be true. It is also an argument for why the country needs a publicly owned generator large enough to reinvest what it earns rather than pay it out in dividends, not an argument against one.

Renewables will, over time, genuinely bring bills down. Industry modellers expect the number of hours in which gas sets the price to keep falling as more wind and solar comes online, and that should mean real relief eventually. Nobody sensible disputes that cheap generation is better than expensive generation. The dispute is over who banks the difference while the country waits, and on the numbers from this quarter, the answer is not the households paying for it.

The wind is free. The profit is not.