How much green energy does Ecotricity generate?
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Have you ever wondered how much green energy we generate every year? The past couple of years (2023 and 2024) were our second-highest generation ever and the totals keep climbing in our mission to end fossil fuels.
As it’s Global Wind Day soon, we wanted to share our Live Generation page with you which gives you all the figures and stats you need to keep track of our generation, as well as the green energy being generated right now across Britain.
Let’s break it down
The numbers in the top two panels (below) are live and constantly changing. As we write, it’s a sunny day over most of Britain and breezy but not particularly windy.
It’s a great day for energy generation, with two-thirds of the country’s electricity coming from renewable sources. As you can see from the pie chart on the right, the wind and the sun are contributing roughly equal amounts.
The Ecotricity figures by the windmill show the total energy that our wind and sun parks are generating right now. The graphic underneath shows how much energy we’ve generated over the past 28 days. We have more wind parks than sun parks, so it’s no surprise that wind is far greater than sun in the pie chart.
2023 and 2024 were great years for green energy
The chart below lists our annual green energy generation since 2012. As you can see, there’s been a dramatic increase over the past 13 years, a rise of approximately 240 percent, as we’ve continued to build more sources of green energy.
The rises in yearly generation are not a smooth progression, although the trend is upwards. This is down to the weather and, of course, the effects of climate change on our generation.
Looking at the past five years, 2020 was a very windy year for Britain, which is how total generation reached 194GWh. There were storms throughout the winter, including a couple of named storms in August, and the average wind speed was 7 percent higher than usual. There was also a heatwave and a sunny spring that helped boost sunshine hours to 9 percent over average. All that combined to give us our best year of generation.
The figures for 2021-22 were affected by Covid restrictions on site visits as well as lower average wind speeds. We were back with a bang in 2023 and 2024, with the same huge total of 180GWh for both years. Again, the average wind speed was little higher than normal, leading to two great years for generation.
Help build a greener Britain
The variability in wind and sun amounts, exacerbated by climate change, point to the importance of having plenty of both types of generation in Britain’s mix.
It’s not quite as simple as wind in the winter and sun in the summer, but we need more of both kinds of generation, as well as grid-scale battery storage, to get to 100 percent green electricity as fast as possible.
Over the past 30 years, we’ve built 24 wind parks, three sun parks and one green gasmill. We’ve done this all with the money from our customers’ bills.
If you’re not already with us, join us and see your bill money being put to good use in building more sources of green energy.
Information is correct at time of writing in April 25.
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