Power system records

Britain’s power system broke a string of clean energy records during the quarter. Solar power surged past 15 GW for the first time on 23 April, smashing the previous record of 13.2 GW. A month later, solar supplied a record 19.6% of the country’s electricity over the day. Abundant wind and sun also pushed fossil fuels to new lows. Gas output fell to just 737 MW on 22 April, and one week later fossil fuels supplied less than 5% of electricity over an entire day for the first time. These conditions helped drive the carbon intensity of electricity consumed to a low of just 1 g/kWh on the afternoon of 7 April, when renewable output was high and Britain was importing low-carbon power from France while exporting to the higher-carbon Irish grid.

The tables below look over the past seventeen years (since 2009) and report the record output and share of electricity generation, plus sustained averages over a day, a month, and a calendar year. Cells highlighted in blue are records that were
broken in the second quarter of 2026. Each number links to the date it occurred on the Electric Insights website, so these records can be explored visually.

(3) Note that Britain has no inter-seasonal electricity storage, so we only report on half-hourly and daily records. Elexon and National Grid only report the output of large pumped hydro storage plants. The operation of battery, flywheel and other storage sites is not publicly available.