The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth \u00a31.7bn since the start of the Iran war, as a result of record electricity generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The figure below shows that 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.<\/p>\n
![\"Chart](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Wind_and_solar-scaled.png\")
Monthly generation from wind and solar in terawatt hours on the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), which has a separate electricity system from the island of Ireland, including Northern Ireland. Source: National Energy System Operator (NESO) and Carbon Brief analysis.<\/p>\n
Amid another fossil-fuel price crisis, the record wind and solar output since the start of the Iran war<\/a> avoided the need to import 41TWh of gas \u2013\u00a0roughly 34 tankers<\/a> of liquified natural gas (LNG).<\/p>\n Importing those 34 tankers of LNG would have cost around \u00a31.7bn, given the high gas prices triggered by the conflict.<\/p>\n 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, as shown in the figure below.<\/p>\n Together, wind and solar have generated more than twice as much electricity as fossil fuels over the period since the Iran war began. The country\u2019s electricity mix has now flipped: a decade<\/a> ago, fossil fuels were generating more than four times as much electricity as wind and solar.<\/p>\n Indeed, wind and solar have generated more electricity than fossil fuels for a record 15 months in a row. As shown in the figure below, this included a full winter season for the first time in 2025-26.<\/p>\n This meant that gas was setting the price<\/a> of electricity roughly 25% less often in both March 2026<\/a> and April 2026<\/a> than in the same month in 2022, when fossil-fuel prices spiked after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine<\/a>.<\/p>\n April 2026 also marked a series of other records for the GB electricity system.<\/p>\n For half an hour between 15.30 and 16:00 on 22 April, a record 98.8%<\/a> of the electricity feeding into the country\u2019s main \u201ctransmission\u201d grid\u00a0came from zero-carbon sources, according to the National Energy System Operator<\/a> (NESO).<\/p>\n In addition, solar generation hit a series of new record-highs, ultimately reaching 15.4 gigawatts (GW) on the afternoon of 23 April. Wind set a new record of 23.9GW on 25 March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth \u00a31.7bn since the start of the Iran war,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2597,173,8354,2010,672,2599,5,13391,6,2603],"class_list":{"0":"post-30826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"tag-energy-policy","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-gas","11":"tag-policy","12":"tag-renewable-energy","13":"tag-solar","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-uk-policy","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wind"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116533584339411289","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Chart](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Gas_generation_record_low.png\")
Monthly generation from gas in terawatt hours on the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), which has a separate electricity system from the island of Ireland, includingNorthern Ireland. Source: National Energy System Operator (NESO) and Carbon Brief analysis.<\/p>\n![\"Chart](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Wind_and_solar_beating_fossil-scaled.png\")
Monthly generation from fossil fuels (red) vs wind and solar (blue) in terawatt hours on the island of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), which has a separate electricity system from the island of Ireland, includingNorthern Ireland. Source: National Energy System Operator (NESO) and Carbon Brief analysis.<\/p>\n