The UK’s electricity was the cleanest ever in 2024, new Carbon Brief analysis shows, with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per unit falling by more than two-thirds in a decade.
This is because the UK has phased out coal and is now getting less than half as much electricity from burning fossil fuels as a decade ago, while renewable generation has more than doubled.
In total, fossil fuels made up just 29% of the UK’s electricity in 2024 – the lowest level on record – while renewables reached a record-high 45% and nuclear was another 13%.
As a result, each unit of electricity generated in 2024 was associated with an average of just 124g of CO2, compared with a “carbon intensity” of 419gCO2 per kilowatt hour (kWh) in 2014.
Other key insights from the data include:
- In 2024, the country generated just 91 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity from fossil fuels – mainly gas, as coal was phased out in September – down from 203TWh in 2014 (-55%).
- Renewable sources more than doubled from 65TWh in 2014 to 143TWh in 2024 (+122%).
- Gas-fired power stations remained the UK’s single-largest source of electricity in 2024, generating some 88TWh (28%), just ahead of wind at 84TWh (26%).
- The remaining sources of electricity in 2024 were nuclear (41TWh, 13%), biomass (40TWh, 13%), imports (33TWh, 11%) and solar (14TWh, 4%).
- Some 61% of electricity – or 68% excluding imports – came from clean sources, both records, but a long way off the government’s target of at least 95% clean power by 2030.
- The emissions associated with UK electricity supplies has fallen from 150m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) in 2014 to below 40MtCO2 in 2024, down 74%.
- The reduction in the carbon intensity of electricity means that an electric vehicle (EV) now has lifecycle CO2 savings of 70% over a petrol car, up from only 50% in 2014.
- Similarly, a household using a heat pump instead of a gas boiler is now cutting its heat-related CO2 emissions by 84% per year, rather than only 45% in 2014.
While figures from the National Energy System Operator (NESO) show wind having generated more electricity than gas in 2024, these numbers exclude significant amounts of gas generation, particularly from “combined heat and power” units at industrial sites.
When accounting for all plants burning gas for power in the UK, the fuel remained as the single-largest source of electricity in 2024, slightly ahead of wind.
However, increasing wind power capacity as new projects are completed in the coming months – and below-average wind speeds in 2024 – mean wind is likely to generate more electricity than gas in 2025.
Carbon Brief has published an annual analysis of the UK’s electricity generation in 2023, 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016.
Cleanest ever
Having risen to global dominance on the back of coal-fired industrial might, the UK has made significant progress in cleaning up its power supplies over the past 75 years.
It opened the world’s first civil nuclear power plant in the 1950s, burned oil to generate electricity in the 1960s, made a “dash for gas” in the 1990s, and built renewables in the 2000s and 2010s.
In addition, electricity demand has been falling for nearly two decades, as appliances have become more efficient and the economy has shifted away from heavy industry.
These shifts culminated in the closure of the UK’s last coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, in September of 2024. This ended a 142-year era of burning the fuel for electricity, and made the UK the first country in the G7 to completely phase out coal power.
The end of coal power, combined with the rise of renewables, means the UK’s electricity was the cleanest ever in 2024, as shown in the figure below.
Specifically, the carbon intensity of electricity fell to just 124gCO2/kWh in 2024. This is 70% lower than it was in 2014 when each unit of electricity was associated with 419gCO2/kWh.
Combined with a reduction in demand, the emissions associated with UK electricity supplies have dropped from 150MtCO2 in 2014 to less than 40MtCO2 in 2024, a reduction of 74%. This includes emissions embedded in imported electricity and lifecycle emissions associated with imported biomass.
Under the government’s target for clean power by 2030, the carbon intensity of electricity generation should fall by another two-thirds by the end of the decade, according to NESO.
In its advice on how to reach the target, NESO set out pathways to clean power by 2030 that would see carbon intensity falling to 50gCO2/kWh or lower, depending on how it is measured.
This will be a very significant challenge. Nevertheless, the power sector has already been transformed over the past decade. It was the UK’s largest source of CO2 until 2014 and is now only the fifth largest, after transport, buildings, industry and agriculture.
Fossil fuel decline
The swift reductions in the carbon intensity of UK electricity are due to a rapid shift away from burning fossil fuels to generate power.
In addition to phasing out coal power, the UK has also seen significant reductions in the amount of gas generation over the past decade, while oil-fired electricity generation is negligible.
In total, fossil-fired power generation has fallen by more than half in the past decade. It has dropped from 203TWh in 2014 to 91TWh in 2024 (-55%), reaching the lowest level since 1955.
This reduction is illustrated in the figure below, which shows how the decline of fossil fuel generation has mainly been offset by the rise of renewables.
Combined electricity generation from wind, biomass, solar and hydro has more than doubled from 65TWh in 2014 to 143TWh in 2024 (+122%). Combined with falls for coal and gas, this means that renewables now generate significantly (57%) more electricity in the UK than fossil fuels.
Notably, the carbon intensity of electricity did not fall during the 2000s, because nuclear generation was starting to decline as the nation’s oldest reactors closed down.
With renewables only just starting to ramp up in this period, the country turned back to fossil fuels to replace lost nuclear generation.
In contrast, carbon intensity has fallen rapidly since 2014, despite further nuclear retirements. Nuclear decline and the coal phase out have been more than offset by renewables, imports and falling demand, meaning gas use has also dropped, as shown in the figure below.
While looking ahead to 2030 and beyond, electricity demand is expected to rise as transport and heat are increasingly electrified via EVs and heat pumps (see below).
According to NESO’s recent advice on reaching clean power by 2030, demand for electricity is expected to grow 11% by 2030 and to nearly double by 2050.
Wind powered
Wind has seen the largest increase of any power source in the UK over the past decade. Moreover, it is expected to form the backbone of the nation’s electricity system by 2030.
The rise of wind power and the decline of fossil fuels means that the UK now gets nearly as much electricity from wind as from gas, as shown in the figure below.
Notably, the rise in wind power output has levelled off over the past two years. The main reason for this is that very little new wind capacity has been added.
In 2022, the UK added 3.5 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity, including 3.2GW of offshore wind. This dropped to 1.6GW in 2023, of which 1.1GW came from the Seagreen offshore windfarm off the coast of Scotland, which is currently the nation’s largest and the third-largest in the UK.
However, no new offshore windfarms were added in 2024 and only 0.7GW of new onshore capacity was built, mainly the 0.4GW Viking project in the Shetland Islands.
A further reason for the levelling off in wind power output is that windspeeds have been below average for the past two years.
October and November 2024 have seen particularly poor wind conditions in the UK, respectively 7% and 22% below average – and it has been calm elsewhere in Europe too.
Nevertheless, a new record for wind generation was hit on 19 December 2024, with output reaching 22.5GW for the first time, according to NESO.
Several large new offshore windfarms are under construction and due to open in 2025 or 2026.
These include Dogger Bank A, a 1.2GW development in the North Sea due to open next year, as are the 0.9GW Moray West and 0.5GW Neart na Goithe windfarms off Scotland.
In 2026, these projects are due to be followed by the 1.2GW Dogger Bank B and 1.4GW Sofia windfarms, also in the mid-North Sea region.
Given these new developments and the likelihood that windspeeds will return towards average levels, it is likely that the UK will get more electricity from wind than from gas in 2025.
Biomass is the second largest source of renewable electricity in the UK, generating 40TWh in 2024. This is up 17% from 34TWh in 2023, but roughly the same as in 2022.
The UK’s largest biomass generator, the Drax former coal plant in Yorkshire, had seen subdued output in recent years due to planned outages for refurbishment.
Note that Drax only accounts for around a third of biomass generation, with other biomass power sources, including landfill gas, sewage gas and anaerobic digestion of organic waste.
The UK’s net imports of electricity also reached a record high in 2024, with cheaper prices on the continent and new interconnector capacity meaning more power flowed into the country.
Lower lifecycle
The UK’s cleaner electricity generation in 2024 makes electrified heat and transport far more beneficial in terms of reducing CO2 emissions.
For example, an average petrol car in the UK generates 2.7 tonnes of CO2 (tCO2) per year. In 2014, an EV would have generated 830kg of CO2 – but in 2024 this was just 245kg.
Based on the CO2 intensity of electricity in 2014, it would have taken 16,000 miles (2.2 years) for an EV to pay off the “carbon debt” associated with producing its battery, relative to a petrol car.
Based on the cleaner electricity generated in 2024, this payback is just 12,000 miles (1.6 years).
Put another way, an EV driven on 2014 electricity across its full lifetime would have had lifecycle CO2 emissions that were 50% lower than a petrol car. Now, the lifecycle saving is 70%.
There have been similar benefits for CO2 emissions from household energy use, particularly those that use an electric heat pump.
In 2014, a household with average demand would have been responsible for 1.1tCO2 from its electricity use. Today, that figure has fallen to 0.3tCO2.
For a household with a heat pump, emissions from home heating will have fallen from 1.4tCO2 in 2014 to just 0.4tCO2 in 2024. This means that instead of cutting their annual CO2 emissions from heat by 45%, as they were in 2014, they are now reducing their CO2 output by 84%.
Methodology
The figures in the article are from Carbon Brief analysis of data from DESNZ Energy Trends chapter 5 and chapter 6, as well as from NESO. The figures from NESO are for electricity supplied to the grid in Great Britain only and are adjusted here to include Northern Ireland.
In Carbon Brief’s analysis, the NESO numbers are also adjusted to account for electricity used by power plants on site and for generation by plants not connected to the high-voltage national grid.
NESO already includes estimates for onshore windfarms, but does not cover industrial gas combined heat and power plants and those burning landfill gas, waste or sewage gas.
Carbon intensity figures from 2012 onwards are taken directly from NESO. Pre-2012 estimates are based on the NESO methodology, taking account of fuel use efficiency for earlier years.
The carbon intensity methodology accounts for lifecycle emissions from biomass. It includes emissions for imported electricity, based on the daily electricity mix in the country of origin.
DESNZ historical electricity data, including years before 2012, is adjusted to align with other figures and combined with data on imports from a separate DESNZ dataset. Note that the data prior to 1951 only includes “major” power producers.
The post Analysis: UK’s electricity was cleanest ever in 2024 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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