Details oF the changing face of the UK’s electrical grid and the records being broken by renewables are provided by the latest quarterly Electrical Insights Report, produced by researchers at Imperial College London in collaboration with Drax.
The document, covering January to March 2017, reports that wind, biomass and hydro all registered their highest energy production during this period. And a landmark event arrived in the last weekend of March, with solar recording its highest ever peak output. It was sufficiently high that demand on the national grid was lower during the daytime than it was overnight, the first time this has ever happened.
At this point, solar reached a new peak output of 7.67 GW, enough to power a fifth of the country at the time.
The report also records the continuing decline of coal, which had a 30% drop in output compared to last year, due to high wind output and the mild winter. Carbon emissions were 10% lower than in Q1 2016 as a result.
