DESNZ published the administrative strike prices for Allocation Round 8 on 6 July 2026. In 2024 prices, the ceilings are £271/MWh for floating offshore wind and other deepwater offshore wind, £113/MWh for offshore wind, £92/MWh for onshore wind above 5 MW, and £75/MWh for solar PV above 5 MW.

An ASP is the maximum a project may bid. It is not a forecast of where the auction will land, and the gap between the two is where the interesting analysis sits.

The 15-20% rule of thumb, and why it is too blunt

The commonly quoted figure is that cleared prices come in 15 to 20% below the ASP. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit used that range when AR8 parameters were published, and it is a reasonable first approximation.

It is also an average across technologies and rounds that behaved very differently from one another. Applying a single discount to every technology hides more than it reveals:

  • Solar and onshore wind have often faced far more competition than budget, pushing clearing prices well down
  • Offshore wind in recent rounds has cleared much closer to its ceiling as costs rose
  • AR5 offshore wind cleared at no price at all, because nobody bid
A blanket discount applied to floating offshore wind is particularly unreliable. The technology has appeared in only a handful of rounds, at very different scales, and other deepwater offshore wind is an entirely new category for AR8 with no history whatsoever.

What the data actually shows

Our AR8 page now derives the discount for each technology in each round directly from LCCC's own auction outcomes and administrative strike price datasets, rather than repeating a generic figure. The round-by-round table on that page shows every data point: the ceiling, what it cleared at, and the resulting discount.

Two things stand out when you look at it that way. First, the spread within a single technology across rounds is much wider than the 15-20% band implies. Second, the most recent round is usually far more informative than the average, because supply chain costs and financing conditions dominate.

The AR5 warning

The most consequential number in any allocation round is the one the government sets, not the one the market returns. AR5 in 2023 is the case study: the offshore wind ASP was set below what developers judged deliverable, and the round received no offshore wind bids at all.

You can see the gap it left in the trend on our dashboard — the offshore wind line simply stops at AR5 and resumes at AR6, after the ceiling was raised substantially.

What is different about AR8

Several changes make historical comparison harder than usual:

  • Pot 3 zonal pricing. Offshore wind projects connected to different transmission and distribution tariff zones will carry separate clearing prices. There may not be a single offshore wind number to compare against previous rounds.
  • Budget flexibility. Following the AR7 approach, budgets for pots 1 to 4 can be increased after the sealed bid window where an unsuccessful bid represents strong value for money.
  • No-bid rule reversed. An applicant who does not submit a sealed bid is now treated as withdrawn rather than as having bid at the ASP.

When we will know

That depends on appeals. The indicative timetable branches into five scenarios from 16 September 2026, when qualification outcomes are issued. If every applicant qualifies first time, results land between 27 November and 1 December 2026. If Tier 2 appeals go to Ofgem, it slips to 15-17 February 2027.

The AR8 page lets you step through all five scenarios with the sealed bid, budget setting and results dates for each.