Great Britain produced record amount of wind-powered electricity in 2022

With the rising shortage of coal around the world, nations are finding out renewable ways of harnessing electricity. Both hydropower and wind power deserve to be mentioned in this regard. However, it was the latter that gave Great Britain a record amount of electricity in 2022.  

According to several sources, more electricity was produced from renewable and nuclear-powered sources (over 48.5 per cent) as compared to fossil fuels such as gas and coal (40 per cent).  

Experts around the world are deeming this as an efficient way of mitigating climate change. After all, UK did have the hottest year on record in 2022 and needed a proactive measure to tackle the rising global warming. As a result, replacing fossil fuels with green power such as the wind is the right step in that direction. Not only that, wind is significantly cheaper than gas that was producing over 70 per cent of the country’s electricity till last year, thus making the process of power generation much more cost-effective. What’s impressive is that with gas being the main source of electricity till 2021, wind replacing it in a span of just a year is something that has not been seen anywhere in the world before.  

Additionally, coal that had generated 43 per cent of electricity in 2012 has now come down to only 1.5 per cent within a decade, another milestone that deserves mention. But how did this become possible? Well, wind turbines that were so long only used for private uses were taken over by the government and used extensively for electricity production.  

To put things in perspective, on a single day in late November 2022, around 20 giga watt of electricity was generated by wind that could support more than 1700 homes in the country for a year. But on the last day of the year, this record too was broken when 20.918 giga watt was produced, with the number being on the rise ever since.  

Sources also cite that for five months, February, May, and October to December, more than half of electricity came from zero carbon sources, such as wind and solar powers. In fact, tax restrictions on solar farms and offshore wind turbines have also been lifted.  

For those unaware, Great Britain is high on offshore wind, something that has only increased ever since a ban was put on onshore wind in 2015. In fact, if sources are to be believed, the government has also promised to make huge investments to encourage more green power sources in the near future.   

Due to Russian-Ukraine war, prices of everything including harnessing electricity were on an all-time high in 2022. With that in mind, Great Britain has been moving towards renewable sources of energy with nations like Germany, Spain, Italy, USA and China following in its footsteps.