Story · Energy map · about 4 min
Where does Britain's electricity come from?
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero lists every larger power station running in May 2026. This story walks through them by fuel. Everything here is installed capacity (the most a plant could produce), not the electricity actually generated; a live step near the end shows the difference.
Gas is the biggest
The larger power stations could produce up to 85.1 GW between them. Gas is the biggest single fuel: 52 stations with 33.7 GW, 40% of the total. Each circle is a power station, sized by capacity and coloured by fuel; gas is orange.
Nuclear: a handful of big sites
Nuclear is 5 power stations at 4 sites (Hartlepool, Heysham, Sizewell B and Torness), together 5.9 GW. They are the magenta circles, all beside the sea or an estuary: a reactor needs huge volumes of cooling water, and the sea is the easiest place to get it, so Britain builds them on the coast. Unlike wind or solar, a reactor runs at close to the same output around the clock, so for nuclear the capacity and the electricity actually made usually agree.
Wind: nearly as big as gas
Offshore wind farms (16.9 GW) now out-size onshore ones (13.0 GW), and together wind is 35% of the listed capacity, not far behind gas. The layer underneath is average wind speed: the windy north and west, and the sea, are where the wind farms are. Neither wind nor solar can be switched on at will: what they actually generate depends on the weather at that moment.
Check what is actually happening right now
Switch on "What's powering Britain right now" to see the live split. Come back at a different time of day and it will likely read completely differently. That is the whole point of a weather-dependent grid.
No coal
There is no coal on this map, because there are no coal power stations left. The last, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, closed at the end of September 2024, ending more than a century of coal-fired power in Britain. Solar, meanwhile, is 8% of the capacity listed here, though many smaller solar sites are not listed individually.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- Why is installed capacity not the same as the electricity a power station actually produces?
- Why are the nuclear stations all on the coast?
Try it on the map: Switch on the power stations layer and look at where each fuel clusters, then switch on the live generation mix and note the biggest source right now. Check again later. What changed?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.