Carbon Brief analysis recently showed that fossil fuels supplied a record-low 2.4% of electricity on the island of Great Britain, for one hour on Monday 15 April.
The analysis illustrated how National Grid Electricity System Operator (NGESO), which runs the island’s grid, is closing in on its target of “zero carbon operation” for short periods by 2025.
Yet, despite there being increasingly frequent periods with hardly any electricity coming from fossil fuels, there are still times when gas power remains essential for the GB grid.
Indeed, the analysis noted that for a few hours this January, fossil fuels were meeting around 66% of demand. So is the GB grid getting less dependent on fossil fuels or not?
Snapshots from short periods – when the fossil fuel share of supplies can be very low, or stubbornly high – fail to paint a full picture of what is going on.
Even the annual averages included in the analysis obscure the variability resulting from increased reliance on wind and solar power, which depend on the weather.
The figure below – reminiscent of Joy Division’s iconic “Unknown Pleasures” album cover, designed by Peter Saville in 1979 – paints a more complete picture of how British electricity supplies are shifting decisively away from fossil fuels.
The figure shows the distribution of half-hours in each year since 2009, arranged according to the share of fossil fuels during each time period. (Half-hours are the time period currently used for electricity market “settlement”, when contracts for supply and demand are settled up.)
Periods when the grid was more than 50% reliant on fossil fuels are shaded red and, reading from top to bottom, these have become increasingly rare over the past 15 years. Conversely, periods with less than 50% fossil fuel, shaded blue, are becoming increasingly common.
The figure shows that the entire distribution of half-hour periods in each year has shifted – quite dramatically – away from reliance on fossil fuels.
In other words, not only have the maximum and minimum extremes of fossil fuel reliance reduced, but everything in between has shifted away from fossil fuels, too, including the annual average.
For example, every single half-hour period in 2009 was at least 50% reliant on fossil fuels. In 2024 to date, nearly all half-hours – some 92% of them – were less than 50% reliant on fossil fuels.
Indeed, fossil fuels were supplying less than 15% of GB electricity in around a third of all half-hours in 2024 to date – and less than 23% of the mix in half of all settlement periods.
The figure also shows that the range of maximum to minimum fossil fuel share has widened.
Crucially, there continue to be periods when fossil fuels are indispensable for maintaining secure electricity supplies. Yet as the country shifts towards the current government target of a “fully decarbonised” grid by 2035, those periods will become increasingly unusual.
As a result, while there is a clear need for alternatives to gas power if the grid decarbonisation target is to be met, those alternatives are likely to be called upon fairly infrequently.
This has obvious implications for the alternatives to gas that will be needed. Specifically, there will be a need for flexible low-carbon capacity that can be switched on for relatively short periods.
Overall, while achieving a record-low 2.4% fossil fuel share for an hour in April is a major step forward, there is still a very long way to go if the 2035 target is to be met.
The post Chart: How British electricity supplies are shifting decisively away from fossil fuels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Chart: How British electricity supplies are shifting decisively away from fossil fuels
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Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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