You may have noticed it felt a little less breezy than usual at the start of the year. But when wind speeds were below average, solar pulled through – balancing out low wind generation with plentiful power from the sun. In fact, the 2 billion kilowatt hours plus of solar generation delivered at the start of 2025, almost balanced out the reduction in wind power. Wind speeds quickly returned to the long-term average, pushing gas generation back down to record lows. By June, gas fell to just 21% of Britain’s power mix.   

What this shows us is that the British weather is ideal for clean power generation. Wind and solar complement each other – when one drops the other often steps up. The Ember analysis shows that there are only 2% of days in a typical year in Great Britain when both wind and solar generation are low. In other words, on days that it is not sunny, it is almost always windy – or a combination of both.   

This data confirms that in order to build a secure and reliable clean power system, we need a diverse mix of both wind and solar. It’s why Thrive is focused on diversifying our portfolio, most recently acquiring a 10MW solar farm to complement our fleet of wind projects. Dunmow solar farm certainly made the most of this year’s sunshine, generating enough clean electricity to power over 8,000 homes in June, which was particularly sunny. Meanwhile we have two new onshore wind farms in construction to further complement the portfolio, which also includes hydro, solar and battery storage.   

Whilst solar and wind can be considered the backbone of renewables generation – and are well aligned to support peak electricity demand during the daytime – hydro, tidal and geothermal can provide consistent baseload power when the sun sets and the wind dies down. Technologies benefiting from a mix of natural resources, plus storage systems, can be used to smooth out the delivery power on the occassions when wind and solar are less abundant. In other words, creating a clean power system that works for us all is very much a team effort, with each of our infinite energy resources playing their part. 

[1] Based on generation figure of 9.91 TWh and calculated using the most recent statistics from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) showing that UK average domestic household consumption is 3,301kWh per annum (1,650kWh for a half year period). 9.91TWh could therefore power 6,004,241 homes for a half year. Scotland’s population is 5,490,100 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates