Britain quietly passed
20 gigawatts of solar.
No ribbon was cut. No minister stood in a field. But Britain, a country internationally famous for drizzle, now has more than 20GW of solar capacity bolted to its roofs and fields. On a good afternoon it is one of the largest single things on the grid.
🏘️ Hundreds of thousands of roofs
The growth has not come from one giant project. It has come from an enormous number of small ones: several hundred thousand rooftop systems added, plus solar farms filling in the gaps.
This is the least glamorous way to build a power station and by some distance the fastest.
It also means the generation is distributed across the whole country rather than sitting behind one constrained cable in Scotland. That matters more than people realise.
📈 Solar is very rude about the middle of the day
Solar has one habit and it never varies. It produces almost nothing at breakfast, an enormous amount at lunch, and nothing at all at dinner.
That shape is fine when there is a small amount of it. When there is 20GW of it, the shape becomes the market. It drags midday prices toward zero and sometimes straight through it.
Which is why the cheapest electricity of the day has moved. It used to be the middle of the night. Increasingly, in summer, it is the middle of the afternoon.
⏰ Your habits are still on the old timetable
Most household routines were set decades ago, around a grid that was mostly coal and gas, where night was cheap and day was dear. Economy 7 was built for that world.
That world is gone. Nobody sent a memo.
So the dishwasher runs at midnight out of habit, on a summer day when 1pm was the cheap hour and midnight was not.
Britain has built one of the largest solar fleets in northern Europe, which is a bit like Norway becoming a leading exporter of pineapples. It works. It produces vast amounts of free electricity every summer lunchtime. And most of us are at work, running nothing, waiting patiently for the expensive part of the day.