This is likely because you buy from the grid and your energy provider sells to the grid at market rates. This is a basic economics supply/demand problem. When there is a lot of demand for a product, the cost goes up. Almost always. In this particular case, the cost for non wind energy is going up (because of the war) so people who used to buy from Oil/Coal/Whatever are now trying to buy wind. They are trying to buy it, you are trying to buy it, there is only so much of it. The seller sells it for more and the cost goes up.

All electricity goes through the same grid. If you are next to a coal power plant, you probably get most of your electricity from it. Buying renewable energy means the provider promises to buy (or produce) an amount of renewable energy equal to your consumption. But not at the same time as your consumption necessarily. You get power even when there's no wind and wind provides power when it's windy no matter what. Usually nuclear and renewables work all the time and coal and gas are used to adjust production to match demand because it's easy and fast to ramp them up and down.

The cost of energy in the market at any given time is determined by the most expensive production method producing at that time. Otherwise that method would have to stop producing (can’t operate on a loss), and that can’t happen since demand and supply must always be equal in the grid.

At base consumption level, the most efficient (cheapest) power plants are used and the price is low. When demand increases, more expensive power generation methods must be brought online and the price has to make it possible.

Infrastructure must be maintained or reliability falls. Costs increase, maintenance increase rates go up. The continual adding of renewable energy is very costly as well, and tge continual increase on demand <electric cars> adds to the whole situation.

In large scale, energy is bought and sold bsaed on supply and demand. "*How it is made"* is not a factor in deciding the price of commodities.

The cost of energy is a wholesale market, it changes constantly like the stock market does. If supply exceeds demand you can even end up with negative prices

(https://slate.com/business/2015/09/texas-electricity-goes-negative-wind-power-was-so-plentiful-one-night-that-producers-paid-the-state-to-take-it.html)

Wind doesn’t blow all the time. So while your provider may be buying 100% of your energy consumption in wind energy, you are physically consuming a variety of energy generated at all hours of the day and night.

The existing wind farm doesn’t cost much to run - really just maintenance. But if more people want wind, you’ve got to find a windy place, lease the land rights, order big turbines and blades, build the wind farm, and connect to the grid. That’s is expensive. Then you need to buy energy for when the wind isn’t blowing. With coal plants being removed, nuclear stagnant, not a lot of reliable, firm energy to fill growing demand.

Basically battery storage or geothermal. My money is on geothermal.

Even though a wind farm doesn’t need fuel, it still has ongoing costs, and those costs change over time. One example is the lockdowns made it difficult to get replacement parts for everything, so maintenance costs increased. With the large wage gains we’ve seen the last couple of years, labor costs have increased for everything. Interest rates have skyrocketed so the interest on any loans used to build the wind farms has increased.

Assuming they're cost-plus pricing: labor, parts amd distribution costs are up. New / replacement turbines are more costly. Any debt refinancing, or variable rate debt the business has is also more expensive.

The mistake you're making is assuming prices are based solely on input cost. They aren't. They're based on supply and demand. Demand increasing will increase price. Likewise supply from other electricity sources decreasing will also increase price.

Companies charge what the market will bear, not what production costs. They charge at least what production costs but never miss an opportunity to make profit.

Speculative because I don't know the specifics of your provider, but if they paid for infrastructure interest has an impact.

Most source generation is constructed via loan, and just like a conventional loan as the interest rate changes the cost of those capital investments which is amortized over users has to change.

This doesn't account for new investment, supply and demand calculation, or if your provider is just a reseller (where their vendor would be subject to a lot of these market conditions as well, and they're passing it onto you).

effectively your energy supplier is not supplying you with wind energy, they are paying for someone else to use coal/oil/gas instead, so they can say the wind energy supplied to the grid from wind farms is what you get

Does your electricity work when the wind is still? Does it ever go off for fifteen minutes or so?

If not, then your provider is 100% lying to you about it being 100% wind energy.

Because maintaining those "green" energy farms cost more money. Its not going to be cheaper because its "free" energy...

First, they need to pay for windmills and to keep them running and to maintain the grid. Secondly, the cost of other energy sources determines the market so they can set their prices based on that. By signing up for this "100% renewable energy" you still get the same power, a larger cut of your money just goes to the renewable sources.

Because wind is expensive to buy when you dont produce it yourself.

The idea that renewable will be cheaper by default is a strange one.

North America has electric several grids shared between Canada, and the United States.

I think the one in Europe/Northern Africa/Middle east operates in a very similar fashion(but I’m not sure). It’s called the “European Super Grid”.

Power plants connected to those grids ramp up and down throughout the day production based on usages/predictions of usage(its going to be hot might change how much is planned to be generated in a day). In theory, the coal/natural gas/windmill/solar/other near you creates enough electricity for your area and usually a little bit more to feed into the larger grid. This is to serve areas without dedicated plants, deal with line loss, and shore up plants that either don’t produce enough for their area or compensate for areas that can’t ramp up and down quickly.

Solar and wind can’t ramp up like as fast as natural gas or in the same ways. Or they have been contracted to only produce X amount of energy in a period(which often sucks that they’re limited). If it’s not as windy that day, there isn’t much you can do about it. Hydro electric can allow more water through. Coal can put more coal in. Natural gas plants can burn more gas. Etc.

Energy storage would help mitigate some of these problems(store power when not a ton of people are using it, and release it slowly when they are) but there aren’t very efficient ways to do that yet.

Since power generation is distributed on a grid there has to be a way to normalize what the price of power is. Fossil fuel plants have set the prices for power in the United States because they are incumbents and that is the system that was setup. They made up the rules to benefit themselves. Renewable power generation facilities can see massive profits when energy costs go up, because their costs stay(relatively) the same.

This benefits the renewable companies so there isn’t a big push for changing the status quo of allowing fossil fuel plants to set the market rate.

Energy providers pump electricity supply onto regional grids. The grid is just a combination of all generation sources, so there's no way to sell a consumer "only" wind power. What they can do is ensure that the money you pay goes entirely to providers who are only generating electricity from wind. The overhead of dealing with a separate energy brokerage method demands some kind of premium, usually.

Electric plants of any kind sell electricity by the kilowatt hour to utilities through energy brokers. The energy market sets the price through supply and demand, which changes depending on a lot of factors, including who else is selling on the market, the price of generating from these different sources, consumer demand, etc.

Any large scale effects on global industries can cause price changes for a variety of factors. For instance, covid cause microchip shortage, which affects any industry that requires electronics. The Ukraine/Russia war creates imbalance with energy production, which can cause changes in how people buy energy.

In the EU, renewable energy producers can get a so-called “Guarantee of Origin” that validates that the renewable energy producer has produced 1 MWh of renewable energy.
Think of this guarantee as a certificate.
This certificate can be sold to the company where you buy your electricity, which sells the associated renewable energy to you.

However, this is just for you to proof that you have bought some more climate friendly energy than otherwise.

The “Guarantee of Origin” doesn’t have anything to do with the price of energy.

For your second question:
Energy prices are calculated for each hour, by estimating the demand within a region, then collecting bids from electricity producers and then fulfilling the demand starting from the cheapest source and accepting bids until demand is met.
The price of the last needed accepted bid (to meet demand) sets the price for all accepted bids. This is called marginal pricing.

For some hours (in some regions) demand can be met without accepting bids from electricity producers that use natural gas and some hours it is needed. Electricity made by burning natural gas (and other fossil fuels) is quite expensive compared to other sources. The capacity to produce electricity from natural gas is sometimes still needed to meet demand. So when natural gas is part of the energy mix, it generally sets the price.

This generally makes it fairly lucrative for renewable energy such as wind and solar, since the cost is lower but they get a very high markup when fossil fuel is a part of the mix.

I haven’t heard that COVID did anything to the energy prices. But for the war in Ukraine, the price for natural gas skyrocketed (peaked at over 10x of todays price) mostly due to speculation about the future supply. Lower supply and roughly same demand = higher price.
The speculation about supply was due to Russias geopolitical shenanigans and the lower than usual flow in e.g. the Nord Stream pipeline (from Russia to Germany). The pipeline got blown up, European countries tried to lower the demand and other sources of natural gas was procured.

Negative prices can even occur, which can be due to the terms of some subsidies for renewable energy or just renewable energy not having the capability to turn off when needed, but they still need somebody to use that energy.

So the cost of electricity from wind didn’t change, but because all electricity is traded equally and electricity from natural gas changed, the overall price for electricity was higher.

Extra:
Other things factored in to why electricity prices in Europe were very high in 2022.
A lot of French nuclear reactors and German coal plants were not active for various reasons, which only further limited the supply.

If you're buying electricity in the UK the government has tied all electricity to the price of electricity generated by burning gas... All other follows suit meaning that the companies selling Nuclear and Wind generate electricity etc have had a massive windfall at our expense.

Worked for a big 6 Energy company in the UK, so to put it simply like others have said they buy from the National Grid, the thing is no matter how the energy was made it all goes into the same 'powerbank' (like the phone charger ones).

This powerbank is used by us all and now less people are 'charging' it, Energy companies pay in a way that's called hedging so they pay for a quarter of a year's energy at a time and basically have to buy more than they think they will need so they take this into account too (if everyone had a smart meter they could buy more accurately, this is the real benefit of them and why they push them so much, they don't want to waste money).

Due to world events and the price increasing they have paid more than they normally would and they aren't going to use the shareholders bonuses to help the customers so they increased what we pay by alot.

It's basically that simple they aren't going to stop producing record profits for the sake of us, profit is after they have paid wages/for the energy they are selling to us and while we are all struggling to pay they are making more money than ever before, it is literally profiteering at the misfortune of the common folk.

A big American Oil company made more in one recent year than a person would if they got paid 40,000 every single day since the day Jesus was born up until now, this is an unimaginable amount of money that just 1 company made, the other companies are not going to just ignore this.

The energy you actually use in your home could have come from anywhere but the grid took the same amount from 'renewable' sources, what the company gets is just Energy.

Your standing charge is increasing because the smaller companies are going bankrupt, when this happens depending on the area those customers are just given to other companies and even though this essentially is more free money for them, they aren't going to do the administration for free and that's why that has increased simply because they now have more customers to give them money, they won't employ more people to speak to these customers though and that's why wait times are longer now too.

Our company for months asked that we apologize at the beginning of every call for the wait time we spoke to someone, I asked multiple times why we should do this instead of employing more staff and was basically told people like being apologized to and that it will sort itself out, after months of not doing this and getting told off by higher-ups for not doing it (why apologize to stop people complaining about something they should actually fix) I just couldn't do it anymore.

Before the world event we could give people quite alot of money for complaints/problems/issues and stuff like that, basically saying here's some money are we okay now?, This completely stopped and we couldn't even give someone £5 to get them off the call without a managers approval, ended up with 5x more complaints open and 10x more emails that we were expected to deal with while being on the phone constantly you end one call and another one comes instantly, our bonus criteria wasn't being met so we were being paid less for more work and the company wasn't doing anything about it, as bad as it sounds we praised when systems broke due to the workload and we got some time off work but then you'd get an 80 year old widow who's terrified and hasn't put the heating on for weeks crying it's just fucked and they don't care about us.

Energy providers are not necessarily energy generators. Your energy provider buys electricity from many energy generators and delivers it to you and other consumers.

Simplest way to explain why the prices vary goes like this. Imagine that you are using very little electricity. Now your energy provider has a bunch of generators willing to sell you electricity which drives the price lower.

Why?

Because renewable energy generation is extremely hard to control. You can control turning a turbine on or off but you cannot control the amount of wind acting on a turbine. If generators generate a lot of electricity, it has to be consumed. They can't just let it go into the air.

Now, imagine you need a lot of energy because you're running a lot of appliances. Since there's limited generation, the more you consume, the more pricing power the generators get. This drives the price of electricity up a lot.

Companies still pay same wages to all these corpo folks who work 9-5. Infrastructure is also kept by specialist that also want to match inflation rates.

In the UK energy generation from wind or other renewables cannot be sold at a lower price than the wholesale gas price . It's a Government/Gas/Oil scam to ensure fossil fuels can cash in for as long as possible

Because someone else is getting rich and it ain't you! But you are subsidizing the new energy billionaire's!

Feeling like a sucker yet?

Energy prices aren't constant. If you are on a fixed rate retail price, then they seem constant, but the wholesale price is always changing.

In quite a few areas, there are markets for electricity where you can purchase at the wholesale price rather than a fixed retail rate, so it will fluctuate. You may be on such a plan. The risk there is that if the wholesale price spikes (like it did in the big Texas freeze), then you're on the hook for that.

Prices go up when demand is up and more supply is needed. All utilities that deliver power to you are constantly buying and selling from each other.

Because you couldn't afford or were just to lazy to install the wind turbine on your own, and thus relied on someone else to do it who could afford to.

Therefore, now you must pay. ... & pay... & pay

Well, there's other market demand reasons people talk about which are explained better than I can.

But also, wind has *some* costs. Ongoing maintenance and repair of the windmills and all that are still subject to market demand. Labor costs, parts, etc.

And my best guess is that the cost is there to fund adding new windmills too, which aren't cheap, and those are probably going up in cost as well.

If you get your energy from the grid, then their cost of production doesn’t matter. They produce cheap electricity and sell it on the grid for whatever they can get. The cost to you has to be more than what they could otherwise sell it for on the grid.

Every form of energy has costs:

1) fuel
2) cost to build
3) cost to maintain

Some forms of energy have an extra cost:

4) cost to create and maintain backup energy source if main source is unavailable.

For oil, fuel costs are high, but it is dependable and pretty cheap to build. Nuclear has cheap fuel costs and is dependable, but has a high cost to build. Hydro is even better than nuclear, since fuel costs are effectively zero, and it is still dependable.

Wind also has no fuel costs, but the cost to build is high (each windmill produces a small fraction of what nuclear can produce) and, even worse, wind needs “backup power” on standby (often in the form of gas or oil) for when the wind is not blowing. The cost of the backups is part of the cost of wind power.

Wind produces the most energy at night when there is very low demand for power, so it is harder for your energy producer to recoup the costs of building the wind farms and transmitting the power.

It is like Kristoff in Frozen selling ice during the winter storm. There isn't a demand for power/ice at night/winter storm, but it still costs money to produce and transmit power to a market that doesn't need it.

Energy prices are going up for a lot of reasons. Coal plants are shutting down and the energy that they produce needs to be replaced. People want renewables, and maybe rightly so, but coal plants could produce power on demand. Renewables do not. If you want reliability, renewables are not at a point where that can happen. So coal plants are shutting down and companies are building renewables, but there is still a need to provide power on demand and during peak times, power companies are investing in ways to balance the power and keep reliability but it all costs money to transition.

Because the cost of labor has gone up and the dirty little secret of “renewables” is that a much larger portion of the cost of production is labor.

Wind farms require maintenance, which requires skilled professionals being paid to maintain it. This means in order to retain said professionals, they have to give them a raise so they can maintain their lifestyle, or run the risk that their employees will find work with another company willing to pay them what they are worth. Furthermore, maintaining equipment involves buying parts to replace ones that wear out, the price of which will increase, as does the cost of having parts delivered.

Yes wind farms can produce a lot of electricity cheaply, but if the demand for that electricity outweighs the supply, then the prices will keep going up until demand shrinks to match supply. Things are not priced based on how much they cost to produce, they are priced based on supply and demand.

ELI5 - you got scammed.
You got swindled by an energy reseller and you will end up paying more. They are preying on your social values - you get the same electricity as all of us, you’re just opting in to pay more to subsidize the rest of us. You may pay less on year 1, but by year 5, you’re paying more.

Never. Ever. Engage. With. An. Energy. Reseller. Unless. You. Plan. To. Scam. Them. Back. With. Rapid. Turnover.

It should become cheaper, because wind (and sun for solar) are free sources. You don't have to constantly buy oil and gas anymore. The only costs are the initial investment and the maintenance. The higher the demand of clean energy, the higher are the investment costs, because new wind turbines has to be build. That costs have to be paid by the consumers. During the pandemic lot's of businesses were shortened and therefore also all the prices around wind energy rose, too.

The wind doesn’t just shoot energy into the grid. Windmills cost money to service and upkeep. If the price of everything else is going up. That will too.

The true ELI5 answer is that while the wind might be plentiful, you try making electricity out of it. You buy electricity from someone and if their costs go up, so do yours

Generation Costs:

|Type|Generation Cost / kwh||
|:-|:-|:-|
|Solar|$0.1000||
|Wind|$0.0500||
|Coal|$0.0850||
|Nuclear|$0.0960||
|Natural Gas|$0.0320||
|Hydro Electric|$0.0085||

Then add transmission, admin costs etc.... Wind and Solar are 5 to 10 times more expensive as hydro.

Some of the reason is new tech requires new infrastructure, while Hydro, Coal, Gas, and Nuclear use existing infradtructure.

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Didn’t read all the comments but I think people are forgetting that that is just how the free market works. Prices don’t go up (just) because costs go up. Prices go up because demand is high enough and/or supply is low enough for people to keep buying.