Inspired by this Washington Post article, I have decided to map how the UK generates electricity using publicly available data maintained by the wonderful colleagues of mine at TU Delft. My only caveat with the data is that power plant level generation data is not referenced, so I do not know to which year(s) they pertain to, so please take the breakdown by output with a grain of salt. Excellent real time generation data is available from the balancing report, but they are displayed by fuel type rather than by station.
Natural gas and coal still occupy the top ranks in terms of capacity installed. All of the large biomass power stations have been converted from coal (Drax, Tilbury) or are still co-firing coal (Fiddlers Ferry, Alberthaw B, Cottam) . The coal power plants still running today have all opted-in to the emissions standards set by the Large Combustion Plant Directive. The merit order of natural gas and coal generation change dependent on the price of fuel and the price of carbon emission (EU ETS + UK carbon pricing floor), so the percentage power generated by coal and gas change from year to year.
The nuclear power stations, all located on the coast, are all due for retirement by 2025, except for Sizewell B, the UK's newest nuclear power station, commissioned in 1995. There are talks of commissioning more new nuclear plants, at Hinkley point C, for example, but the planning process is highly contested. Providing baseload power, they run most of the time except when refuelling or maintenance is scheduled.
The UK does not have very large hydro stations. Instead, it has a network of smaller hydro plants, mostly located in Scotland. The larger stations tend to be pumped-storage hydro plants that use overnight electricity to recharge their reservoirs (Cruachan, the first pumped hydro station in the world, and Foyers).
Although some oil-fired generation plants are still listed, but no signification generation occurs today, since the last of the oil giants, Littlebrook, was shut down permanently this spring. Generation by fuel oil had its heydays during the 1960s and has been declining since. The higher price of fuel since 1970s, combined with more stringent emission standards, led to the closure of all important stations.
This map does not reflect the presence of solar generation in the UK well, because, unlike centralized power stations registered with the power grid, the any photovoltaic panels deployed UK are small-scale distributed projects connected to the grid at generation level, and are thus invisible as "embedded generation". By the end of 2014, 5000 MW of solar power has been installed in the country, almost doubling that of the year before. The largest solar farm deployed, Southwick Estate Solar Farm (48 MW) is not yet listed in the database. And, it is likely that it will remain so, because the Department of Energy and Climate Change has declared that the future solar strategy for the UK focuses on commercial and industrial rooftop rather than on ground mount.
The UK boasts the largest fleet of off-shore wind turbines in the world since 2008. The London Array, at 630 MW and located 20 km off the Kent coast, is the largest offshore wind farm in the world, and the largest wind farm in Europe by capacity. It should bring Britons joys that the same weather that makes for an underwhelming local holiday provides them with some of the best wind resources around the globe. The generation data within the database also risk underreporting the presence of wind, because about 50% of wind generation is embedded (and unmetered) within the distribution network.
Other renewable energy is a catch-all category that reunites generating plants ranging from biogas, geothermal, landfill gas, municipal solid waste, to tidal and wave power. Both capacity and generation information from this group of power plants are not well documented. Most of the time, the power generated by such sites are consumed locally by an industrial complex, instead of being transferred to the grid for sales downstream.