Q2 2022: Capacity and production statistics

Dr Iain Staffell, Professor Richard Green, Professor Tim Green and Dr Malte Jansen – Imperial College London 

Despite gas prices reaching record highs, the share of electricity produced from gas actually increased over the last year.  It supplied more than two-fifths of electricity over the past quarter.

Wind output was up by two-fifths on this time last year, a welcome relief that stemmed the increase in gas generation somewhat.

These changes were dwarfed by the change in trade though, exports were five times higher than the same quarter last year, and imports down two-thirds.

^[3] Other sources give different values because of the types of plant they consider.  For example, BEIS Energy Trends records an additional 0.7 GW of hydro, 0.6 GW of biomass and 3 GW of waste-to-energy plants.  These plants and their output are not visible to the electricity transmission system and so cannot be reported on here.

^[4] We include an estimate of the installed capacity of smaller storage devices which are not monitored by the electricity market operator.  Britain’s storage capacity is made up of 2.9 GW of pumped hydro storage, 0.6 GW of lithium-ion batteries, 0.4 GW of flywheels and 0.3 GW of compressed air.