Britain now has more installed wind capacity than any other type of power source, overtaking combined cycle gas plants for the first time and ending more than a century of fossil fuel dominance, a new report for energy group Drax showed Wednesday.
By June 2023, Britain’s wind farm fleet will have reached 27.9 gigawatts (GW) of capacity, surpassing the total capacity of gas-fired power stations of 27.7 GW, according to the study prepared by experts at Imperial College London and the University of Sussex for the quarterly Drax Electric Insights.
From the Victorian era until 2011, coal was the largest source of generating capacity in the U.K., according to the study’s authors. Natural gas was Britain’s largest source of electricity capacity for the last 10 years, before being overtaken by wind capacity.
Over the past 10 years, the UK’s wind capacity has tripled and is now almost evenly split between 14.1 GW of onshore wind capacity and 13.8 GW of offshore wind farms. Half of this capacity is in England and its seas, with three-eighths in Scotland and one-eighth in Wales, according to the report.
Wind capacity is set to increase further in the short to medium term, with 6.7 GW of wind farms currently under construction, according to the analysis.
In recent months, however, the UK wind industry has suffered setbacks, particularly for offshore wind projects, as cost inflation has hampered new developments. In a further blow to the UK’s offshore wind ambitions, no offshore wind bids were received in the UK’s recent clean energy auction.