More precisely, the government has cost the people who would've built those privately funded renewable energy projects billions. The way the UK energy market an

More precisely, the government has cost the people who would've built those privately funded renewable energy projects billions. The way the UK energy market and pretty much every other energy market globally is structured, every provider receives the price of the most expensive energy source needed to satisfy demand, which would be gas generation in the current market. There's no easy way to "fix" the market so that this doesn't happen; unlike gas, renewables have basically no incremental cost to pump out power to the grid when they have capacity, so they submit zero or even negative bids and are entirely funded by the difference between that and the actual market power price. The same is not true of government-subsidised projects in the UK like offshore wind. Those are guaranteed a fixed price by the government, and receive payments to make up the shortfall or pay back the excess under what's called a "contract for difference". The contracted prices of current offshore wind projects are... well below the current market price of electricity, let's put it that way. (Not every country does things this way. As an article that made it to HN the other day pointed out, Germany guaranteed a minimum and let suppliers keep the excess which was an expensive mistake: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32556113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32556113) Offshore wind also fits better into an overall strategy of switching to renewable energy, since it has a much better capacity factor and is actually useful in the winter unlike solar.