Wind has accounted for the largest share of the UK’s electricity capacity mix for the first time, after more than a century of fossil fuel dominance.
That’s according to Drax Group plc’s latest second-quarter Electric Insights report, which said the country’s wind farm fleet reached 29.7 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in June, surpassing for the first time the combined cycle gas power plants and making the The United Kingdom is the fifth country in the world to have wind energy as the main generator of electricity, joining Denmark, Spain, Ireland and Finland.
Gas had been the UK’s biggest source of energy for the past 10 years, and before that coal was the leader for decades. Since 2011, coal-fired capacity has been reduced as coal-fired power plants have retired from 28 GW to just two GW, the report said. Dozens of gas-fired power plants were built in the 1990s, and their capacity peaked at 30 GW in 2010. Since then, gas has been in slow decline, with no new plants being built of fossil fuels since 2016, the report notes.
On the other hand, UK wind capacity has tripled over the past decade, split almost equally between onshore and offshore capacity at 14.1GW and 13.8GW respectively. Around half of the projects are in England and its seas, while three-eighths are in Scotland and one-eighth in Wales, according to the report. According to the report, around $74.6 billion (GBP 60 billion) has been invested in wind power over the past 20 years in Britain, mainly by pension funds and other large institutional investors.
Looking ahead, the report predicts that UK wind capacity will continue to grow at pace, with 6.7 GW of wind farms currently under construction. “Scotland’s largest offshore farm, Seagreen, is nearing completion with other major projects underway off the coast of East Anglia and on the Dogger Bank. Beyond this, the UK has a number of a staggering 98 GW of offshore wind, a pipeline that is the second largest in the world (behind only China), ahead of the United States and all European countries,” the report notes.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel electricity generation in the UK fell to its lowest levels since the COVID-19 lockdown. Fossil fuels produced 22.2 terawatt-hours of electricity over the past three months, just over a third of total electricity demand, the report said. Output from gas-fired power plants fell 23 percent compared with the second quarter of 2022, and coal output fell by three-quarters to their lowest levels on record.
The key driver for the decline in fossil fuel use was “the reversal of fortunes on the continent, which led to a reversal of flows through the interconnectors,” the report said, explaining that “with stores of gas replenished and part of the French nuclear fleet coming back online, Britain’s neighboring countries had less power.” Since last year, Britain went from exporting 1.7 GW to importing 3.4 GW, a change of more than five GW, the report noted.Carbon emissions from electricity production fell below 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the quarter for only the second time , with the previous case during the COVID lockdown, he said.
In terms of electricity production, in the second quarter, gas overtook wind to be the main source of electricity produced, representing 35.2 percent of the energy mix compared to 21.3 percent of the wind This was partly driven by low wind speeds, meaning wind farms produced a sixth less electricity than last year, although capacity grew by 10 percent, according to the report
The quarterly Electric Insights report was created by energy firm Drax to help inform and illuminate the debate on British electricity. Since 2016, it has been independently delivered by a team of academics at Imperial College London using data courtesy of Elexon, National Grid and Sheffield Solar.
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