How much renewable electricity is the UK using? Find out with Drax Electric Insights

What is Electric Insights?

Electric Insights provides data visualisation and analysis of supply, demand, price and environmental impact of Great Britain’s electricity. Created by Drax, it uses only publicly available data, meaning it’s an independent and transparent source, with analysis supported by academic researchers.

View the website to see things like:

• Which energy sources we’re using right now, across the country
• Current electricity demand
• Current power prices
• The environmental impact of generation

Then there’s the full Electric Insights dashboard. Here, you can view historical data, and toggle with options to see what you’re most interested in viewing.

How to find out how much renewable energy powered the first three months of 2020

There are many ways you can use the Electric Insights data. Follow these steps on your computer or tablet in landscape view to see how much renewable energy powered Great Britain throughout the first three months of the year.

Step 1: Set your dates

Use the drop-down menu at the top to select Sum, for 3 months, from 01/01/2020 – this will show the sum of all energy generation from 1st January, to 31st March.

Step 2: Set to renewable sources

To show only renewable source generation, set the dropdown ‘Show the production breakdown of’ to ‘Renewable’.

This will reset the graph to show only solar, wind, hydro and biomass energy generation.

Step 3: Analyse the data

Once you’ve done steps 1 and 2, you can begin analyse the data. For example, we can see that in Q1 the breakdown of renewable energy generation was:

• Solar – 2.35%
• Wind – 30.34%
• Hydro – 1.99%
• Biomass – 6.57%

Meaning throughout the first 3 months of 2020, Great Britain was supplied by 41.25% renewable supply, and wind was our highest source of energy, producing 12.24TWh of energy.

To see the full breakdown of GB energy supply for January to March, see the pie chart below, taken from the latest Electric Insights report.

Download the full Electric Insights report with the button below.