The Subsidy Clock: a small annual number wearing a big cumulative coat

The specimen. "The Subsidy Clock" (subsidyclock.co.uk, launched via The Daily Sceptic): a live counter that totals UK renewable and low-carbon electricity support since 2002 and ticks it upward in real time. As I write, the direct figure reads about £131.8 billion — and £220bn-plus once it adds its estimated "indirect" costs.

Now the part nobody expects me to say: the site itself is careful. Every figure is sourced. It nets the money generators pay back when the wholesale price beats their strike price. It marks the indirect total "estimated" and calls the share it pins on renewables "a stated judgement." And — this is the bit that matters — it divides. Right there on the homepage it tells you the cost works out at £424.92 per household per year, or 19% of your bill.

So this isn't a hoax, and I won't pretend it is. The slop isn't the website. The slop is what's left when this gets shared — and the reason it works on all of us.

The number that travels

Watch what happens between that careful site and your feed. The post that landed on mine kept the twelve-digit number and the "£15M a day, £627k an hour, paid by every UK energy consumer" — and quietly dropped the £424.92, the 19%, the netting, the "estimated," the word "judgement." Every piece of context the site itself provides, sanded off. What's left is a number built to do exactly one job: make you gasp.

And it works because of one fact about every single one of us: nobody can actually feel the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion. They land in the same spot in your head — "big, and aimed at me." A twelve-digit number on a ticking clock isn't information, it's a feeling. £424.92 a year is a figure you could argue about over a pint. £131,835,301,722 is a figure you can only be frightened by. That isn't a side effect of the design. It is the design — and it's aimed squarely at the people who can't picture the gap between those numbers, which is to say everyone.

Is the "indirect" framing even fair? That's a real argument — carbon pricing is a tax, revenue to the Treasury, and grid and balancing charges exist for any energy mix, an all-gas one included, so filing them under "renewables subsidy" is a stretch. But the site flags all of it as an estimate and a judgement, and shows its working. You can disagree with a judgement that's shown its working. You can't disagree with a twelve-digit number that's had its working deleted, because there's nothing left to check.

And the thing the £131.8bn actually bought — guaranteed offtake that drove offshore-wind strike prices down roughly 70% between 2015 and 2019 — is why recent auctions clear below wholesale. The subsidy bought a learning curve. The shared version invoices you for the tuition and hides the graduate.

So I pointed the same clock at everything else

The cumulative-counter format has exactly one move: "look how big the number is." Fine. Here's the same machine, pointed at things nobody builds a ticking clock for. Switch the subject, watch it tick, and read the two lines underneath each one — what it actually bought, and what it cost beyond money. Those are the lines the shared version always leaves out.

The correct framing

Subsidy figures mean nothing as a lump. They mean something per unit of energy and net of value delivered: cost per MWh, against the capacity and generation it financed and the gas imports it displaced, with CfD counted as the two-way contract it is, and with fossil-fuel support, fuel duty freezes and North Sea reliefs, on the same ledger. Do that and the renewables line stops being a scandal and starts being one of the better-value things on the page. Green levies are a small and shrinking slice of a bill that was driven up by gas prices, not by the clock.

Kicker. Any number is a scandal if you let it run for twenty-four years and forbid yourself from dividing. The tell isn't the figure on the Subsidy Clock, it's that nobody ever builds one of these for the bills they'd rather you didn't add up.