Home & Garden
24 December 2019
From Christmas lights to a roast dinner, many British festive traditions wouldn’t be possible without electricity.
To celebrate electricity’s role in powering Christmas, National Grid has released 12 facts behind the festivities, from the cost of lighting a tree to powering those new games consoles – and just how many people will be working on Christmas day to keep the lights on.
If every UK household celebrating Christmas (approximately 25 million homes) strung a single chain of Christmas lights all in a row, we would have approximately 150,000 miles of lights – that’s enough to illuminate the British coastline twenty times over.
It costs approximately 50p to light trees with LED lights for six hours a day throughout the entire festive period. For those using the incandescent variety, the cost is over four times that, rising to £2 for the same amount of time.
The energy peak on Christmas Day 2023 was at 13:30, suggesting that’s the time everyone gets cooking their Christmas dinners. In fact, it is the only day of the year that the energy peak is not at teatime.
Since its launch on December 29 2023, National Grid’s latest, record-breaking interconnector – Viking Link – has exported enough electricity to bake around 4 billion mince pies.
National Grid Electricity Distribution data experts have been crunching the numbers, and the data say demand for electricity rose by 15.5% last December compared with the 2023 monthly average as the nation turns on its Christmas lights.
In the UK, people traditionally start to put up their Christmas trees from the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which this year was Sunday 01 December, providing 36 days of twinkling lights until the twelfth night, or 06 January.
For a sprout-tacular fact… Did you know in the UK we buy approximately 750 million sprouts at Christmas time? If you placed all those sprouts end to end, they’d cover approximately 15,000 miles.
Turkey remains the meal of choice for most Christmas dinners and, according to the British Poultry Council, Brits buy a massive 8 to 9 million of them in the run-up to the big day.
Cooking 8.5 million turkeys requires 63 GWh of energy – enough to power 23,500 homes annually. In fact, putting a turkey in the oven for one hour uses the equivalent amount of energy as lighting a single string of Christmas lights for six hours a day for the entire Christmas period!
We Brits love our gadgets, with 65% admitting they spend five hours or more cosying up with their electric gadgets over Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
In fact, over two million were sold in 2023. If two million games consoles were played for just one hour, they would use 180MWh of electricity, or enough to power 24,000 homes for a single day.
National Grid employees will clock up 8,542 working hours between them over Christmas Day and Boxing Day – that’s equivalent to over 355 days’ work!
Did you know that the way you cook Christmas dinner can help you save energy and money? Keeping the lids on your pans as you cook uses 10% less energy than if they were removed.
Consider adding smart plugs or timers to your Christmas list. We estimate that if the country switched all TVs off standby, it could save a collective £12.5 million and over 50GWh of power annually, which is equivalent to the annual energy consumption of nearly 19,000 homes.
From TVs and set-top boxes to games consoles, soundbars and phone chargers, leaving things on stand-by all adds up.
For the first time last year (2023), renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) have exceeded 50% of the electricity production in Britain on Christmas Day, compared with less than 1% on Christmas day in 2009.
How your choice of wrapping paper and cards can benefit our forests.
Pine needles from Christmas trees could be turned into paint and food sweeteners.
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