The move away from dirty fossil fuels is steadily gaining momentum. This week the UK managed to span a whole 55 hours relying solely on renewable energy sources.
Between 10:25pm in London on Monday April 16th and 5:10am on Thursday April 19th 2018, the UK went 55 hours coal free, beating the country’s previous record of 40 hours, achieved in November 2017. During this time renewables produced enough energy to maintain the grid unsupported, meaning that the country’s coal-fired power stations didn’t have to provide any extra to top it up.
The UK has a range of renewable energy sources available to it. As well as solar farms and land-based wind turbines, it also has more off-shore wind farms than any other country. In 2017, off-shore wind provided enough electricity to power 5.3 million houses – 20% of the UK total. This amount can only increase as new wind farms begin generating power, with increasing investment and technology.
A number of other countries have also recently achieved milestones of renewable energy production. In March 2018, Portugal produced more energy from renewables than it needed, reaching 103% production. Meanwhile, India’s renewable generation for 2017 passed one lakh gigawatt hours (GWh) in a single year for the first time. It exceeded in purely renewable energy the total electricity generation of other relatively populous developing nations, such as the Philippines, as well as small but advanced economies, such as Belgium.
If renewable energy production continues to follow these current trends of improvement, it won’t be long before energy gained by burning fossil fuels becomes a thing of the past.
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