New North Sea windfarms to get multi-national connections...

If I understand this correctly, the CfD arrangement is essentially hiding the fact that for those generators, they have a fixed price contract (+ annual inflation) where that 'fixed price' was determined at the 'qualifying' auction of CfD contracts.

And that the CfD mechanism is a set mechanism of Windfall tax/subsidies that are applied to the hourly margin price the generators  would have otherwise have been paid.

This it allows the governments to present the situation as a continuos auction for the best electricity prices (to the unaware public).

Meanwhile they can sell the very same auction to the bidding generators as being a great deal [naive politics] because they get paid the marginal [cut-off] bid price. (the savvy commercial parts of the generators realise it's a tidy fixed price scenario)

And yet again, the government has mechanism to create a nice fluctuating pool of CfD windfall taxes and subsidies to support those that are working toward the climate goals (CO2 reduction). 

TurboGen said:

no renewables generator can afford to invest hundreds of millions or billions

Hidden away is the "Technology Learning" curve investment ideal that I saw years ago (April 2000) by Jesper Gundermann when looking at the early Dutch investment in wind technology. I still have a mathcad worksheet. Can't find other references to that level of analysis.

The curtailment pricing and payments to the extra generators to make up for the curtailed generation I guess is done as part of determining the margin price (thus common for everyone), but I may be wrong.  I'd suspect that the curtailed generation is 'paid' at the CfD rate, so isn't as massive as some claim, being mainly accountancy money that sits inside the CfD fund.

CFD Explained - stick with it. Warning CAT PRESENT!Contract for difference explained

The link is badly formatted (in notification email). You may want to edit the post to correct it.

As noted on a reddit comment, Kathryn Porter is well known for being pro fossil fuels. [snip unhelpful stuff].