Pick any Contract for Difference and you will find a strike price attached to it. Neart na Gaoithe, the 448 MW offshore wind farm in the outer Firth of Forth, has one of £114.39/MWh. That number appears in auction results, in press coverage, and in our own project registry.
It is also not the price the project is paid.
Two different price bases
CfD strike prices are quoted in 2012 prices. That convention exists for a good reason: it lets you compare a contract awarded in 2015 against one awarded in 2026 without inflation muddying the picture. Every strike price you see in an allocation round result is expressed on that common basis.
Settlement is different. The contract is indexed to CPI, so the figure actually used to calculate payments rises every year. By the time a contract is being settled in 2026, the gap between the quoted price and the settled price is substantial.
A worked example
Take August 2026 for Neart na Gaoithe. The LCCC data gives us three figures for that month:
| Figure | Value |
|---|---|
| Generation | 75,556 MWh |
| Generation-weighted IMRP | £119.88/MWh |
| CfD payment | +£3.61m received |
Now look at what happens if you take the quoted strike price at face value. The market reference price of £119.88 sits above £114.39. On a two-way CfD, that should mean the generator pays money back to LCCC. Instead it received £3.61m.
The reconciliation is straightforward once you work backwards from the money that actually moved:
| Step | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Market revenue | 75,556 × £119.88 | £9.06m |
| Plus CfD top-up | + £3.61m | £12.67m |
| Effective price per MWh | £12.67m ÷ 75,556 | £167.68/MWh |
So the settled strike price in August 2026 was £167.68/MWh, not £114.39. That is an indexation factor of 1.466, which is what you would expect for CPI between 2012 and 2026.
The annual step is visible in the data
Run the same calculation across every month and something useful falls out. The derived figure is not noisy — it lands on exactly two values:
| Period | Settled strike price |
|---|---|
| September 2025 – March 2026 | £162.82/MWh |
| April 2026 – August 2026 | £167.68/MWh |
Generation, market prices and payment amounts all vary month to month, yet the derived strike price is constant within each CfD year and steps up by 2.99% in April. That is the annual CPI indexation landing exactly where the contract says it should, and it is a useful check that the calculation is sound.
The £162.82 figure is independently corroborated. Analyst David Turver, writing in January 2026, noted that Neart na Gaoithe activated its CfD in April 2025 at a strike price of £162.82/MWh — a figure reached by a completely different route to ours.
What to do about it
If you are comparing a CfD strike price against wholesale prices, PPA terms, or another contract, check which basis each number is on first. Specifically:
- Auction results and allocation round tables are in the price base for that round, usually 2012 and more recently 2024
- Market reference prices published by LCCC are in current prices
- The settled strike price is the quoted price adjusted for CPI, and steps up each April
On renDAQ, every project page derives the indexed strike from the actual settlement rather than showing only the quoted figure, so the arithmetic on the page reconciles.