A First: U.K. Renewables Generate More Electricity than Fossil Fuels

Another 40 percent came from renewables, including 20 percent from wind, 12 percent from biomass and 6 percent from solar. Nuclear contributed most of the remainder, generating 19 percent of the total.

While it is unlikely that renewables will generate more electricity than fossil fuels during the full year of 2019, it is now a question of when– rather than if – this further milestone will be passed.

This summer, National Grid predictedthat zero-carbon sources of electricity – wind, nuclear, solar and hydro, but not biomass – would generate more electricity than fossil fuels during 2019. Carbon Brief’s analysis through to the third quarter of the year is in line with this forecast.

New Capacity
Over the past year, the most significant reason for rising renewable generation has been an increase in capacity as new offshore windfarms have opened. The 1,200 megawatt (MW) Hornsea One project was completedin October, becoming the world’s largest offshore windfarm. The 588MW Beatrice offshore windfarm was completed in Q2 of this year.

These schemes add to the more than 2,100MWof offshore capacity that started operating during 2018. Further capacity is already being built, including the 714MW East Anglia One project that started generating electricitythis year and will be completed in 2020.

In total, government contracts for offshore wind will take capacity from nearly 8,500MW today to around 20,000MW by the mid-2020s. The government and industry are jointly aiming for at least 30,000MW of offshore wind capacity by 2030, with two further contract auctions already expected.

In September, the latest auction round produced record-low dealsfor offshore windfarms that will generate electricity more cheaply than expected market prices – and potentially below the cost of running existing gas plants.

Other contributors to the recent increase in renewable generation include the opening of the 420MW Lynemouth biomass plant in Northumberland last year and the addition of hundreds of megawatts of new onshore wind and solar farms. (Another new 299MW biomass plant being built on Teesside, with a scheduled openingin early 2020, is facing “major delays”.)

According to the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy(BEIS), the rise in renewable output during the firsthalfof 2019 was down to these increases in capacity, with weather conditions not unusual for the time of year.

Some two-thirds of electricity generated from biomass in the U.K. comes from “plant biomass”, primarily wood pellets burnt at Lynemouth and the Drax plant in Yorkshire. The remainder comes from an array of smaller sites based on landfill gas, sewage gas or anaerobic digestion.

The Committee on Climate Change says the U.K. should “move away” from large-scale biomass power plants, once existing subsidy contracts for Drax and Lynemouth expire in 2027.

Using biomass to generate electricity is not zero-carbonand in some circumstancescould lead to higher emissions than from fossil fuels. Moreover, there are more valuable uses for the world’s limited supply of biomass feedstock, the CCC says, including carbon sequestration and hard-to-abate sectors with few alternatives.

In terms of fossil-fuel generating capacity, the U.K.’s remaining coal plants are rapidly closing down, well ahead of a 2025 deadline to phase out unabated burning of the fuel. By March 2020, just four coal plants will remain in the U.K.

Utility firms have plans to build up to 30,000MWof new gas capacity – including 3,600MW at Drax recently given government planning approval– despite the fact that government projectionssuggest only around 6,000MW might be needed by 2035.

It is unlikely that all of the planned new gas capacity will get built. The schemes are generally relianton winning contracts under the U.K.’s capacity market, which is designed to ensure electricity supply is always sufficient to meet demand.

The rise of renewables means that gas generation is likely to continue falling in the U.K., whether or not this new capacity gets built. Nevertheless, the U.K. is unlikely to meetits legally binding goal of cutting overall emissions to net-zero by 2050, unless progress in the electricity sector is matched by reductions in other parts of the U.K. economy, such as heating and transport.

Consecutive Months
Carbon Brief’s electricity-sector analysis shows that renewables are also estimated to have generated more electricity than fossil fuels during the individual months of August and September, the first time there have been two consecutive such months.

Previously, renewables beat fossil fuels in September 2018 – the first-ever whole month – and then again in March 2019. This means that there have only ever been four months where renewables outpaced fossil generation, of which three have been this year and two in the last two months.

This is shown in this chart, which also highlights the greater month-to-month variability in electricity generation and demand, which is overlaid on top of the broader seasonal cycles.

In the first three quarters of 2019, renewables outpaced fossil fuels on 103 of the 273 individual days, Carbon Brief analysis suggests. This is more than one-third of the days in the year so far and includes 40 of the 91 days in the third quarter of 2019.

(Although this is not a majority of days, the aggregate output during the quarter was higher for renewables. This is because their excess over fossil fuels was large on some days.)

As expected from the monthly aggregates in the chart, above, these days with higher renewable generation are concentrated in March and the third quarter of 2019, as shown in the chart, below.

The total of 103 days with higher renewable electricity generation than from fossil fuels in the first three quarters of the year is far in excess of the 67 such days by the same point in 2018.

This is shown in the chart, below, which also highlights the fact that there had never been any days with higher renewable generation until 2015.

There have already been nearly as many higher renewable days in the first three quarters of 2019, at 103, as there were in the whole of 2018, which saw 107 such days. There were only 58 such days in 2017, just 16 in 2016 and 12 in 2015. The first ever day when U.K. renewables generated more electricity than fossil fuels was 11 April 2015.