Britain's best start to a year for wind and sun — and the 6.5 TWh we threw away
GB wind and solar both set year-to-date records in 2026. Counting them properly means adding back embedded generation, adding back curtailment, and not trusting the series most people reach for.
Britain has just had its best start to a year for wind and sun on record. That much has been reported, and it is true.
The figures being quoted for it are wrong, though, and not by a little. Getting to the real ones took three corrections, and every one of them is a better story than the record itself.
The first is that a large slice of British wind, and very nearly all of British solar, is invisible to the dataset most people quote. It is real electricity, metered somewhere else, and simply absent from the series that gets cited.
The second is that a growing share of the wind was generated and then paid to stop. That volume can be reconstructed settlement period by settlement period, and putting it back changes how fast the fleet has actually grown.
The third is the uncomfortable one. The Elexon dataset built for precisely this question is wrong in both directions, for months at a time — and the error changes sign partway through, right across the years you would use for a year-on-year comparison. Nothing flags it. Every figure is present; they are just wrong.
Below, working from eleven years of half-hourly generation data, every balancing action taken on a wind farm since 2016, and 1.14 million forecast-hours:
what GB wind and solar really produced this year, counted properly
whether the two genuinely hedge each other, and the trap that makes the answer come out backwards
how good NESO's wind forecast is, once you stop grading it against the wrong thing
the one weather regime where it reliably over-predicts — and why the obvious physical explanation for that turns out to be wrong
what it would take to fix a British winter by building more solar, an arithmetic that ends the argument
and how long Britain's wind-and-solar droughts actually last, which is the only number that sizes storage