United Kingdom Energy Dashboard

Grid Summary

In the United Kingdom, renewable energies are an important part of the climate change strategy and are strongly supported by a green certificate system (with an obligation on suppliers to purchase a certain percentage of electricity from RES) and several grant programmes. Progress towards meeting the target has been significant (electricity generation from renewable energies has increased by around 70% between 2000-2005), although there is still some way to go to meet the 2010 target. Growth has been mainly driven by the development of significant wind energy capacity, including offshore wind farms. The renewables targets are calculated as the share of renewable consumption to gross final energy consumption. Renewables consumption comprises the direct use of renewables (e.g. biofuels) plus the part of electricity and heat that is produced from renewables (e.g. wind, hydro), while final energy consumption is the energy that households, industry, services, agriculture and the transport sector use. The denominator for the RES share includes also distribution losses for electricity and heat and the consumption of these fuels in the process of producing electricity and heat…more information.

The UK had installed electricity generation capacity of 74.0 gigawatts (GW) in 2003. Also in 2003, the UK generated 369.9 billion kilowatthours (Bkwh) of electricity while consuming 346.1 Bkwh. Most electricity generation comes from conventional thermal sources (74 percent), followed by nuclear (23 percent), other renewables (2 percent), and hydroelectricity (1 percent). The UK government has introduced regulations that require electricity distributors to source a portion of their electricity supply from renewables (including hydroelectricity), currently 3 percent but set to rise to 10 percent by 2010. Investments in wind power have increased substantially, aiming to take advantage of the natural geographic advantage that the UK has in this regard. Another area of increased interest has been wave power. In 2004, the Pelamis project off the coast of Orkney delivered the first ever supply of electricity from wave energy to the UK national grid. Finally, hydroelectricity has regained attention, especially in Scotland, including the potential construction of the 100-MW Glendoe project...more information.