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Renewables provided more than half of the UK’s electricity for the second consecutive year in 2025, delivering 52.1%, up from 50.5% in 2024, new government statistics have confirmed. According to the figures, highlighted by industry body RenewableUK, renewables generated a record 153 TWh last year, on the back of rises in wind and solar capacity, above-average wind speeds and record sunshine. Wind provided 29.5% of the UK's electricity in 2025, up from 29.2% in 2024, while solar generated a record 6.9%. RenewableUK’s CEO Tara Singh said the statistics are good news for billpayers as in 2025 wind reduced wholesale electricity prices by 31% by cutting the need for gas-fired power plants.
Tara Singh has vested interests and her statement is disproved by the CFD payments in 2025 that show that we paid an additional £2,4bn on our bills through CFDs for wind that were higher than the price of gas. The more wind we use, the more our bills will go up.
Who gives a shit unless it lowers prices. Ever wonder why bills are so expensive when we use all this cheap wonderful green power, it doesn't make much sense to me. America use oil and gas bought from the same world market as us, yet somehow there bills are a fraction on ours.
All our energy is pegged to the price of gas, which means, every other form of energy is crazy expensive, which is great for energy companies and their shareholders but bad for us the normal people so guess what will never change
The world is literally on fire and people want to burn even more fossil fuels. Absolute insanity
A lot of people give a shit. Generally, people's level of giving-a-shit is positively correlated with their IQ.
Because that's how energy prices work (currently). The price is set by the highest price product currently engaged in the stack at any given time. That is fossil fuel, so even if 95% of your given demand is renewables and 5% is gas, you pay the gas price for all of it. The stack is filled from the lowest bid price to the highest bid price in order, until demand is filled, and then all suppliers get paid the highest price. There are good reasons for this system -- it stops cheap energy generators charging artificially high prices, because they risk not being engaged -- but it also leads to this perverse seeming situation where we all pay gas prices. If renewables could cover the whole demand energy would be much cheaper.
I got paid to use electricity over the last two weekends because of renewables
Who gives a shit unless it lowers prices.
I do. Obviously lower prices would be great but this is a good thing regardless
Switch to something like Octopus Agile tariff. When there is a lot of solar and wind energy, then the wholesale cost of electricity goes down. This will directly translate to your cost per joule of energy to go down too. Last week, there was so much wind and solar energy that the wholesale cost of electricity became negative. I literally got paid money to use electricity. But a few weeks before that, when there was a ton of gas generators being used, the wholesale cost of electricity went up quite high so it was more expensive to use electricity. So yes, renewables does lower prices. Gas increases prices. And you can experience it if you change your tariff.
And how much more expensive would it be if we relied soley on gas? Have you seen the price of gas recently? It's just come under 8p domestic Every bit of renewable we use pushes that gas out of use, it's saved us billions but no one cares because you can't physically see it
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Thank fuck, now keep those numbers moving skywards.
Your bill most definitely won't come down no matter how much the provide
Ignore the massive writing on the wall that says INTERMITTENCY and no storage solutions, keep increasing our reliance on gas
Also move off gas for heating and petrol/diesel for vehicles.
I’m proud to say I added 4,7638.26kWh solar power into the grid last year. The government really needs to push for more people to add rooftop solar. I live in an estate of about 200 houses. Most are perfect for rooftop solar but I’m the only one with it.
Every daily mail reader in the land just collectively spat their tea out
They'll probably blame our sky high prices on it.
Perhaps we could generate more renewable power from that.
The comments sections usually make out that the statistics are bogus anyway.
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Yeah that's great but I'm still paying a fortune for electricity.
Problem is that we are such a tiny part of carbon emissions, the other countries need to do the same
They are, even despite all the craziness in the US they’re moving in that direction simply because the economics are better.
This also means that we generated 50% of our needs domestically without the need of a foreign entity. It's not all about carbon
Electrifying everything helps. With increased adoption of EVs and hopefully heat pumps we dramatically lower the primary energy required for those functions, as well as making them.less carbon intensive by moving them on to a renewable grid.
And we still the highest electricity bills in the world, privatising has the fucked the british people way up ⬆️ in there
We see this statement a lot, but we also have pretty secure energy and that's one of the reasons our bills are higher as well. It's the benefit of a smart tariff like agile, it takes away the security and puts all the risk on the customer but they also reap the rewards if savvy Floods of Americans are posting about getting their bills in recent months with an extra $200 a month without warning because of some AI data centre that's being built. Texans getting $1200 bills in one go and limited supplies when their grid is struggling, constant blackouts and paying out the arse As a whole I don't actually think it's true, not since COVID anyway.
Then why are our bills not coming down? When half the electricity is generated at a marginal cost of zero, how badly are we fucking up in managing the energy system that we have the most expensive electricity in the developed world?