The share of electricity in Great Britain generated from burning coal and gas fell to a record-low 2.4% earlier this month, Carbon Brief analysis shows.
The record low was reached at lunchtime on Monday 15 April and lasted for one hour. There have been a record 75 half-hour periods in 2024 to date when fossil fuels met less than 5% of demand.
There were only five such periods during the whole of 2022 – and just 16 last year.
The findings show that National Grid Electricity System Operator (NGESO) is closing in on its target of running the country’s electricity network without fossil fuels, for short periods, by 2025.
NGESO is “confident” this target will be met, its director of system operations tells Carbon Brief, adding that achieving the goal will be “absolutely groundbreaking and pretty much world leading”.
However, Carbon Brief’s analysis also illustrates some of the challenges to meeting the government’s target of a fully decarbonised electricity grid by 2035.
Fossil fuels fall
The island of Great Britain, comprising England, Scotland and Wales, has its own independent electricity system, which is managed at the transmission level by NGESO.
The transmission grid is effectively the motorway network for electricity.
It links large-scale electricity suppliers such as coal, gas and nuclear power plants to centres of demand, in towns and cities around the country.
Other companies run the low-voltage “distribution” networks, which take power from the transmission grid and distribute it to individual homes and businesses.
For most of its existence, this system had remained largely unchanged for decades. More recently, it has been in the midst of a rapid transformation as part of national efforts to reduce emissions.
In 2009, some 74% of GB electricity was coming from fossil fuels and only 2% was from renewables.
By 2023, there were several thousand large renewable sites dotted around the country, as well as nearly 1.5m small solar installations on the roofs of homes, offices and warehouses.
Only a third of GB electricity in 2023 came from fossil fuels – with 40% from renewables.
Yet these annual figures disguise even greater changes in the month-to-month, day-to-day, hour-to-hour and second-by-second operation of the electricity system.
The figure below shows the share of electricity in Great Britain being generated by fossil fuels in each half-hour period since 2009, including the record-low of 2.4% earlier this month.
The figure above shows how unprecedented it is for fossil fuels to be meeting such low shares of demand on the GB grid.
Indeed, the lowest half-hourly fossil fuel share in 2009 was 53% and, as recently as 2018, it had never dipped below 10%. The first half-hour period with less than 5% fossil fuels only came in 2022, when there were five such periods in total across the year.
During 2023, there were just 16 half-hour periods with less than 5% fossil fuels – the majority of which came during December of that year.
In contrast, there have already been 75 half-hours with less than 5% fossil fuels in 2024 to date.
The shift to ever lower fossil fuel use is illustrated in the figure below, which shows daily average shares starting to regularly drop below 10% in December 2023 and April 2024.
The daily average fossil fuel share fell to a record low of 6.4% on 5 April 2024, with the average on 15 April 2024 standing at 7.0%. Until 2022, the daily average had never been below 10%.
‘Zero-carbon operation’
Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that NGESO is closing in on the target, first set in 2019, of being able to operate the grid with “zero carbon”, for short periods, by 2025.
(NGESO defines this target as being able to run the GB transmission grid without fossil fuels. It bases its goal on a metric of 100% “zero-carbon operation”, meaning the share of demand, excluding imports, being met by renewables connected to the transmission grid or nuclear. It says this metric reached a peak of 90% during two half-hour periods in January and March 2023.)
The first-ever period of at least 30 minutes of “zero carbon operation” is most likely to come in autumn 2025, Craig Dyke, NGESO director of system operations tells Carbon Brief. “We’re confident that we will have the right capabilities on the system to be able to do that,” he adds.
Dyke says this moment will be “absolutely groundbreaking and pretty much world leading”, particularly given the size of the GB economy and the fact that, as an island, its grid is relatively isolated from neighbouring countries.
There have been two separate challenges in reaching this target. The first is having enough low-carbon electricity supplies to be able to cover demand during a given half-hour period.
The second challenge is having the technical capability to keep the grid stable without fossil fuels.
These technical requirements include maintaining the frequency of electricity supplies at close to 50Hz and responding to rapid changes in supply and demand through operational reserves.
NGESO also maintains the ability to restart the grid in the case of a total shutdown, sometimes referred to as “black start”, but now more formally called “restoration”.
Increases in wind and solar capacity mean low-carbon sources are now already sufficient to meet 100% of electricity demand in some periods. However, on the technical side, the 2025 target has been a “significant engineering challenge”, Dyke says:
“Getting to the 2025 ambition has been a significant engineering challenge, which we are solving.”
Grid services have, historically, been provided by fossil fuel power plants. Over the past five years, however, NGESO has been changing the way it procures these services, as well as reforming the rules of grid operation and the way it balances the grid in real time.
For example, through its “pathfinder” projects NGESO has contracted a series of sites that can offer grid services without fossil fuels. These include “synchronous condensers”, effectively giant spinning turbines that provide grid stability without burning fossil fuels.
Other key innovations include the use of batteries to manage the frequency of the grid and “grid forming inverters”, which use sophisticated power electronics to offer different types of grid support.
This development means renewable projects will be able to contribute grid stability services, such as “inertia”, that have traditionally only been offered by conventional fossil fuel generators.
Dyke tells Carbon Brief:
“This hasn’t just happened overnight. It’s been a culmination of a significant amount of effort over a number of years. That’s not just us [NGESO] operating in isolation, that’s planning and collaboration with industry, with [energy regulator] Ofgem and with the government…It’s not just about technologies, it’s about hearts and minds and processes and systems and people working together.”
Fully decarbonised grid
For NGESO, the 2025 goal is a stepping stone on the way to being able to run the grid at zero carbon constantly by 2035, in line with the government target of “fully decarbonised” electricity.
(The opposition Labour party is targeting a decarbonised grid by 2030. This target is seen as incredibly ambitious – and possibly even “unachievable” overall. A spokesperson for NGESO tells Carbon Brief: “Our previously published scenarios shows it is achievable – although challenging.”)
There are several further technical challenges to meeting this 2035 goal.
For example, the rise of variable wind and solar has expanded the ups and downs of fossil fuels in the mix, illustrated by the range between peaks and troughs in the first figure, above.
This is illustrated further in the simplified figure, below, by the increasing gap between the highest and lowest fossil fuel shares seen in each year (upper and lower blue lines, respectively).
The figure below also shows the annual average fossil fuel share of electricity (dashed line) falling from 74% in 2009 to 26% in 2024 to date. (The small increase in this annual average in 2022 was due to the GB grid exporting gas-fired power to France, where much of the nuclear fleet was offline.)
Notably, the maximum fossil fuel share in each half-hour period has declined more slowly than the average or minimum figures, falling from 88% in 2009 to 72% in 2023 and 66% in 2024 to date.
This reflects the fact that the GB grid still relies on gas-fired power stations being able to switch on when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.
Crucially, the nation will need low-carbon alternatives to this gas capacity in order to reach the government’s target of a fully decarbonised grid by 2035.
These alternatives will need to operate across a range of different timescales, from seconds through to weeks and even years. For within-day timescales, this is likely to mean expanding energy storage capacity, principally with batteries, but also pumped hydro or compressed air.
For periods of weeks or seasons, the options include ongoing reliance on unabated gas – which would be incompatible with carbon targets – or the use of hydrogen turbines or gas plants that are coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The post Analysis: Fossil fuels fall to record-low 2.4% of British electricity appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Fossil fuels fall to record-low 2.4% of British electricity
The country’s most valuable utility didn’t like offshore wind. But a proposed merger with Dominion would include a $11.4 billion project in Coastal Virginia.
A utility megamerger announced this week would mean that the largest offshore wind project in the United States would be owned by the same company that already is the nation’s leading developer of renewables and battery storage.
NextEra Energy to Join the Offshore Wind Club, But Does It Matter?
Australia’s new environmental standards are supposed to protect wildlife. Right now, they don’t.
We have one of the worst mammal extinction rates in the world. We’ve already lost 39 species, including the Christmas Island Shrew and the desert rat-kangaroo, while iconic species like the Hairy-Nosed Wombat, Pygmy blue whale and Swift Parrot continue to slide towards extinction. Forests are still being bulldozed at an alarming rate. Rivers and reefs are under serious pressure.
Fixing this sorry state of affairs was why the Federal Government promised to fix Australia’s broken national nature laws—a promise that culminated in the nature law reforms passed late last year.
A big part of these reforms is the creation of new “National Environmental Standards” — rules intended to guide decisions on projects that could damage nature.
But the Government’s latest draft standards—open for consultation until May 29th—fall dangerously short.
Instead of setting clear environmental guardrails, the draft rules risk making it easier for damaging projects to get approved, while nature continues to decline. Legal experts are warning that unless the standards are changed, they could weaken protections rather than strengthen them.
So what are these standards, exactly?
The new standards are a centrepiece of major reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act), which were passed late last year and are designed to fix a broken environmental regulatory system. They are meant to set clear rules for what environmental protection should actually look like.
In simple terms, they’re supposed to answer questions like:
- What measures should developers be made to put in place to protect threatened species?
- How do we ensure the most important habitats and natural places are not hacked away, “death-by-a-thousand-cuts”-style, from ongoing development proposals?
- When should a project simply not go ahead?
- What rules should states follow if they’re in charge of assessing development projects?
- How do we make sure nature is actually improving, not just declining more slowly?
If designed and implemented properly, these standards could become the backbone of strong, effective reformed nature laws.
But right now, they leave huge loopholes open.
The biggest problem: process over outcomes
The biggest problem with the draft standards is that they focus too heavily on whether companies follow a process—not whether nature is genuinely protected in the end. That might sound technical, but it has real-world consequences.
Imagine a company wants to clear critical habitat for a threatened species. Under a strong system, the key question should be: Will this project cause unacceptable or significant environmental harm?
But under the current draft standards, if the company follows the required steps and paperwork, the project could still be considered acceptable — even if the damage to nature is clear.
This is deeply ineffective. Destruction that checks bureaucratic check-boxes is still destruction. The standards should enforce the protection of nature—not just the ticking of procedural boxes.
A smaller definition of habitat could leave wildlife exposed
Another alarming change in the draft standards is the narrowing of how “habitat” is defined, which could have serious consequences for wildlife protection.
Habitat is more than just the exact spot where an animal is seen sleeping, nesting or feeding today; we need to think more holistically about habitat as a connected network of ecosystems that species may rely on to survive, including breeding grounds, migration corridors, areas used during drought or fire, and places they may need to move to as the climate changes.
But the draft standards effectively shrink the areas considered important enough to protect by defining habitat as only very small areas that if destroyed would certainly send the species extinct, rather than habitat which maintains and restores healthy populations able to thrive well into the future.
For animals already under pressure from habitat destruction and climate change, protecting only the bare minimum is a dangerous approach. In practice, that could mean that places which are essential for threatened species to recover and survive long term are destroyed just because they are not classified under the standards as ‘habitat’—a lose-lose outcome for biodiversity and the Australian government’s nature protection goals.
Offsets are still doing too much heavy lifting
Australians have heard the promise before: “Yes, this area will be damaged — but it’ll be offset somewhere else.” In practice, environmental offsets have severely failed to replace what was lost.
You can’t instantly recreate a centuries-old forest. You can’t quickly rebuild complex wildlife habitat. And some ecosystems simply cannot be replaced once destroyed. Yet the draft standards still rely heavily on offsets rather than prioritising avoiding harm in the first place.
The standards must reduce their reliance on offsets, and instead prioritise actual habitat protection. Because once extinction happens, there’s no offset for it.
Australia cannot afford another backwards step on nature
The Albanese Government came to office promising to end Australia’s extinction crisis and repair national nature laws. But this will be a broken promise if the huge loopholes in the National Environmental Standards aren’t addressed.
Right now, Australia is losing wildlife and ecosystems faster than they can recover. Scientists have warned for years that incremental change is no longer enough.
Strong standards could help turn things around by:
- stopping destruction in critical habitat,
- setting firm limits on environmental harm,
- requiring genuine recovery for nature,
- and making decision-makers accountable for real outcomes rather than process.
If the Government locks in rules that prioritise process over protection, Australia risks entrenching the very system that caused the crisis in the first place.
What needs to change?
The Government still has time to fix the draft standards before they are finalised over the next month.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling on the government to:
- ensure decisions are based on outcomes, not just process
- ensure that all important habitat is protected, not just narrow areas
- ensuring that death-by-a-thousand-cuts is avoided by considering the “cumulative impacts” of multiple projects in a region
- ensuring offsets are only used as an absolute last resort
Australians were promised stronger nature laws—not more loopholes. Australia’s wildlife cannot afford another missed opportunity.You can help ensure the Federal Government’s final standards put to parliament are as strong as possible by putting in a quick submission here.
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