Rejoice! The Dunkelflaute is over and we have a new zero carbon record for 2024

14 November, 2024 - Gilbert West

Well that was the worst start to November for a while. I'm talking of course about the 2 weeks in which a Dunkelflaute cloaked the UK in grey, still weather i.e. bad for wind and bad for solar energy production. But it happens every year at the most inconvenient of times so we have to develop strategies that deal with the massive dip in renewables production.

But that's not what this article is about. The lifting of the doldrums means that we staring to see some zero-carbon electricity in the North of Scotland again. The wind turbine fleet caught some wind and this was enough to crank up the MWhs and tip the cumulative total of full zero-carbon electricity days in the North Scotland area to over 200 days. The previous record was 195 days. That record fell in October 2024 and I was expecting to publish this a few weeks ago, but things just ground to a halt for nearly 2 weeks and carbon intensity on all parts of the grid went up and up.

I'm still optimistic that the area will have produced over 220 full days of zero-carbon electricity by year end, but for now I'm off to enjoy the sun.

Number of full days with no CO2 emissions from electricity generation.

Summary

The chart above shows the number of days per year that each grid area produces electricity with zero carbon emissions.

Please note that carbon intensity is measured every half hour. We calculate a full day by summing the number of half hour segments at zero in the year divided by 48 to give the number of days. Therefore the days are not contiguous, but a collection of 48 half hour periods at any time in the year.

Key takeaways

2024 data is of course not yet complete, but we have already seen another record breaking year for North Scotland with over 200 full days of zero carbon electricity so far.
Zero emissions is amazing. As we can clearly see, it has been very difficult to achieve for all 14 grid areas except North Scotland which now does this for more than half the year.
Only 5 of the 14 areas have ever achieved a day at zero.
Carbon intensities of 10, 20, and 30 are also excellent, and many more areas would show up in this chart if that was the criteria, but we wanted to highlight the stark difference between North of Scotland and the rest of the National Grid.