Q3 2020 report

by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

This quarter we discuss two technologies with very different fortunes.  

Offshore wind has been dealt a significant boost after government reaffirmed its commitment to an upgraded target of 40 gigawatts (GW) installed by the end of this decade.  Our first article examines the announcement, and the claim that this would make the UK to wind as Saudi Arabia is to oil.  Our second article looks at the challenge of trying to balance the electricity system with such a lot of renewables.

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by Phil McNally, Energy UK

On October 6^th, the Prime Minister reaffirmed strong commitments to offshore wind.

While this could cement the UK’s world leading position, it alone does not make us “the Saudi Arabia of wind power” as was widely reported.

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

Headline annual figures mask the huge variation in wind output that will be experienced in future.  

Day-to-day management of Britain’s power system will be very different with double our current wind capacity.  The charts below show the daily generation mix over the course of a year, both as it happened with the 2019 generation mix, and how it would look with 2030’s generation mix.

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by Dr Malte Jansen, Imperial College London

Britain’s nuclear power production fell to what is perhaps its lowest level in 40 years.

The country’s reactor fleet have typically produced 6–8 GW over the past decade, but on August 23rd output fell to just 2.49 GW – less than the combined capacity of the original Magnox fleet built in the 1960s.  

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

A lot can change in a decade.  

Around the world, coal is being pushed out of major power systems by renewables, but who has been successful at decarbonising their electricity?  We rank the world’s 30 largest electricity systems by the carbon content of their generation mix, and explore the changes that occurred over the last ten years.  We find that the UK has decarbonised its electricity system at almost twice the pace of any other major economy by growing renewables six-fold and slashing the use of coal.

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

Outages and the ongoing COVID response have taken their toll on Britain’s nuclear output, which fell by almost a fifth from the same three months of last year.

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by Dr Iain Staffell – Imperial College London 

Last quarter saw 11 power system records broken out of the 200+ we follow, compared to 38 in the second quarter of 2020.  

While it was relatively quiet, it was a period of contrasting extremes.  Natural gas and wind power reached all-time highs, while nuclear power fell to the lowest levels on record.

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