The National Grid is responsible for delivering electricity across the UK and combining the generation from many sources to power your home or office.
The last couple of weeks have been mainly sunny with most people confined to their homes with most offices and factories closed. This has resulted in a significant change to our power consumption.
There are plenty of sources that describe how and where your power comes from.
The National Grid shares the raw data in real time and a number of people take that feed and make it presentable.
The one we like are:
Gridwatch: Shows a simple dial based dashboard.
And Lamkate – who display information in clear and concise way that shows current demand and how the power is generated split into Fossil, Renewables, Other that include Nuclear and Biomass as well as our Interconnections that bring Electric Power from Europe.
From this and other sources you can see that as of 27th April we have used zero coal for the last 17 days. In the past month wind and solar generated 7.4GW and Fossil Fuels 8.7GW and of this gas was 8.6GW and Coal just 0.1GW.
What we are seeing is with overall demand falling along with significant growth in Wind and to some extent Solar the need for Fossil is reducing and Coal burning is being cut out of the picture at a rapid rate of knotts.
Interesting times.
