Wind and solar power the UK through gas price crisis
Simon Evans and Ho Woo Nam look at the structural shift in the UK grid as wind and solar repeatedly outproduce fossil fuels and lower gas dependency for Carbon Brief.
Image by Magnific
Simon Evans is Carbon Brief’s deputy editor and policy editor and holds a PhD in biochemistry from Bristol University, UK, and Ho Woo Nam holds an MSc in applied data science with renewable energy from the University of Exeter, UK.
The surge in wind and solar output is cutting the need for gas-fired generation, which has been nearly a third lower than last year and fell to record lows in both March and April 2026.
Wind and solar have generated a record 21 terawatt hours (TWh) on the island of Great Britain since the end of February 2026, when the US and Israel first attacked Iran.
Amid another fossil fuel price crisis, the record wind and solar output since the start of the US-Iran conflict avoided the need to import 41 TWh of gas – roughly 34 tankers of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Importing those 34 tankers of LNG would have cost around £1.7bn, given the high gas prices triggered by the conflict.
At the same time, record wind and solar helped to cut electricity generation from gas by around a third year-on-year to the lowest levels ever recorded for the months of March and April.
Together, wind and solar have generated more than twice as much electricity as fossil fuels over the period since the US-Iran conflict began. The country’s electricity mix has now flipped: a decade ago, fossil fuels were generating more than four times as much electricity as wind and solar.
Indeed, wind and solar have generated more electricity than fossil fuels for a record 15 months in a row. This included a full winter season for the first time in 2025-26.
This meant that gas was setting the price of electricity roughly 25 per cent less often in both March 2026 and April 2026 than in the same month in 2022, when fossil-fuel prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
April 2026 also marked a series of other records for the GB electricity system. For half an hour between 15.30 and 16:00 on April 22, a record 98.8 per cent of the electricity feeding into the country’s main transmission grid came from zero-carbon sources, according to the National Energy System Operator (NESO).
In addition, solar generation hit a series of new record highs, ultimately reaching 15.4 gigawatts (GW) on the afternoon of April 23. Wind set a new record of 23.9 GW on March 25.
The analysis was originally published in Carbon Brief and can be found here.