Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate his Department has made of the total (a) potential amount of renewable electricity that could be generated by wind turbines in the UK and (b) actual amount of renewable electricity generated by wind turbines in the UK that was used by the National Grid in 2021.

BEIS records this information in Chapter 6 of the Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES) publication: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/renewable-sources-of-energy-chapter-6-digest-of-united-kingdom-energy-statistics-dukes.

Table 6.2 shows that installed UK wind capacity was 25.8GW for 2021, generating 64.7TWh of electricity. The theoretical total generating capacity of these turbines is 226TWh of electricity, though this would imply they were generating 100% of the time. Actual output is heavily influenced by weather conditions. Table 6.3 shows that wind operated at 29% of potential maximum in 2021. Typically, we would expect this percentage to increase over time with newer, more efficient deployment