doogal.co.uk blog

Land Registry March 2026

Chris Bell — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:37:55 GMT

I've updated the website with the latest house price data for England and Wales. The annual change figure is the lowest it's been since June 2022, which can be attributed to the change in the stamp duty rates in March 2025, which caused a spike in prices before it came into effect and have now dropped out of the current year's calculation. In fact the same can be said for the low point of June 2022, which was a year after the end of the Covid Stamp Duty holiday

More renewable records

Chris Bell — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:58:33 GMT

Yesterday the UK managed to max out at over 15GW of electricity generated by solar power.

This was a day after the solar record had been set. That day was also windy and for a period we were only generating 0.4GW of electricity from fossil fuels, a new low and also a record low percentage of 1.2%

It would be nice to think it's our current government's positive attitude towards renewables that is helping us break these records, but in reality most of the infrastructure currently powering these records was started several years ago

English IMD data for 2025

Chris Bell — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:10:10 GMT

Since I've had quite a few requests for it, I've updated the postcode data on the website to include the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 2025 dataset for England.

Land Registry February 2026

Chris Bell — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:20:01 GMT

The latest house price data for England and Wales is now on the site. House prices are now falling on an annual basis, although they are still basically flat. The number of sales continues to be on the low side

Records keep being broken

Chris Bell — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:06:15 GMT

Two days ago we broke the record for the amount of solar generated in a half hour period, managing 14.1GW. I'm not sure what new capacity has been added since last summer but I'm guessing a reasonable amount given how early in the summer we've managed to break the record from last year.

Then the following day, we produced the least amount of our electricity using fossil fuels in a half hour period, with just 0.85GW coming from gas. One day very soon the whole grid will be running on low carbon power for a short period of time.

Update - The problem with reporting this data so soon after the event is that it sometimes gets updated afterwards. The data for the 7th of April was adjusted and the record for solar was broken yet again, reaching 14.4GW at lunchtime.

New renewable energy records

Chris Bell — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:47:20 GMT

On the 25th of March, we experienced a consistently windy day. Not only that, we had a decent amount of sunshine. This combination led to some records being broken. We managed to run the grid for half an hour with only 2.1% coming from fossil fuels. The average fossil fuel usage for the day was also a record at 6.3%. We are hopefully very close to running the grid entirely on clean energy when conditions are favourable. We also smashed the record for low carbon production, hitting a maximum of nearly 40GW and averaging 30.8GW over the day. Finally, we also generated the most power from wind in a half hour period, hitting 23.88GW.

Also of note is the difference in the price of electricity between the day (when renewables were dominating) where prices were less than £20/MWh and the evening (when more gas generation was needed) and prices shot up to over £120/MWh

Postcode data for February 2026

Chris Bell — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:31:13 GMT

Apologies for the late update, something is happening with the ONS website that meant I couldn't find the latest release using my usual search. I did eventually find it when looking for something else.

https://www.doogal.co.uk/UKPostcodes

People have asked about the latest Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) statistics. These haven't been updated in this release. I will now investigate including this data from the original sources.

If you spot any problems, let me know

Land Registry January 2026

Chris Bell — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:26:33 GMT

I've uploaded the latest house price data to the website. On an annualised basis, prices are basically flat across the country, with low sales volumes

Land Registry December 2025

Chris Bell — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:44:53 GMT

I've uploaded the latest property sales data from the Land Registry. Not much changes, a low number of sales with prices still increasing on annual basis but drifting lower every month. The annual change chart over the last few years looks like a patient having a cardiac arrest as each change to Stamp Duty drives prices up or down

Land Registry November 2025

Chris Bell — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:39:05 GMT

The latest property sales data is up on the site. It's a continuation of previous months with low sales volumes and flat lining prices

Electricity generation mix in 2025

Chris Bell — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:02:20 GMT

It's almost the end of the year so I thought I'd take a look at how the energy transition is going in the UK. You can find the data here.

For the second year, wind is our biggest source of electricity, rising slightly from an average of 9.4GW to 9.8GW. I expect wind will continue to be our biggest source for the foreseeable future, unless a new clean, cheap energy source appears.

Solar is still a small part of our energy mix, but increased from 1.6GW to 2.1GW. That's actually a big increase compared to previous years and I suspect solar could become a much bigger part of our electricity supply, since it produces lots of power in the summer whilst wind excels in the winter.

Other good news was coal producing no power at all for the first year since electricity generation began in 1882.

The bad news was there was also an increase in electricity production from gas and also a small increase in the carbon intensity of electricity generation. I suspect this is due to electricity demand starting to increase and the build out of renewables not keeping up.

UK wind power hits 23GW

Chris Bell — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 08:56:31 GMT

Yesterday, UK wind generation hit a new milestone of 23GW for the first time ever, a year to the day since we hit 22GW and smashing the record set a few weeks ago, maxing out at 23.8GW.

UK electricity generation on 5 Dec 2025

GB station usage data 2025

Chris Bell — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:37:05 GMT

I've uploaded the latest station usage data to the site. Overall usage has finally passed its pre-pandemic level. London Liverpool Street retains its title as the busiest station in the country, Elton and Orston is now the least used station

Land Registry October 2025

Chris Bell — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:40:12 GMT

I've uploaded the latest house price data for England and Wales to the website. Prices continue to be in positive territory, although I'd guess in the next month or two, they'll be going down. The number of sales continue to fall

Postcode data for November 2025

Chris Bell — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:48:54 GMT

The latest postcode data from the ONS is now available on the site. Everything looks in order but let me know if you find anything amiss

Land Registry September 2025

Chris Bell — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:35:24 GMT

The latest house price data from the Land Registry is now on the site. More of the same, low sales, prices up annually but moving downwards

Land Registry August 2025

Chris Bell — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:28:59 GMT

It's that time of the month again when the Land Registry release their house sales data for England and Wales. The website has been updated and the data shows prices still increasing slightly on an annual basis but looking to be going down over a shorter time frame. Sales are still in the doldrums.

Things are more interesting at the regional level. Most of the areas with falling prices are in the South and the ones with rising prices are mostly in the North. This is the first time I can remember this being the case.

The strange case of 26th June 2023

Chris Bell — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 20:00:44 GMT

The data on my UK electricity generation page is automatically updated every day. A couple of months ago I was looking at the latest update and noticed some of the top level records had changed but not on the previous day. It's not unusual for recent data to get updated but now the data was saying a number of electricity generation records had been broken on 26th June 2023, over 2 years ago.

Initially I thought this was an error in the data and it would be corrected at some point but here we are 2 months later and the data remains the same. So what's up? Why was the data updated and why so long after the actual event?

I did some Googling for uk electricity generation 26th June 2023 but nothing turned up. I also did a search on Bing and my page came up as the top result so that's nice but it couldn't tell me anything special about that day. I even tried asking ChatGPT, which proved even less useful.

So all we can do is look at the data for the day and for the previous day. The 25th was a good day for solar and wind generation and as the sun disappeared, gas started to ramp up as it usually does. But at 6pm, gas generation started to fall fairly dramatically until 10pm. Then it continued to fall but at a much slower rate. This continued until 5:30am on the 26th, when gas reached virtually zero generation. After this, things fairly rapidly returned to normal.

So what happened? Why did gas generation reach a new record low that we've never got close to again? One possibility is that this a data glitch, but why was did it appear in the data set two years after the event? One reason this looks like it could be the correct answer is that it doesn't look like we were actually producing enough power during the evening of the 25th (although it is possible we were importing more than usual).

But a more interesting theory is that this was actually an experiment to see how the grid coped with mostly clean energy sources. It's my undersanding that electricity generation that involves turbines helps keep the grid's AC frequency in sync, so there have been some questions about how we deal with that when most of our electricity comes from renewables. The fact this weirdness happened in the middle of the night and the gradual withdrawal of gas from the mix gives some credence to this theory. And if that is what happened, the fact we haven't come close to these low levels of fossil fuel usage again may suggest the test was not completely successful.

Anyway, I am going to ask NESO what is happening with that day's data and will let you know if I get a response.

Update - I got a response from NESO. The data is wrong, nothing of interest happened in the world of electricity generation on 26th June 2023.

Postcode data for August 2025

Chris Bell — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:55:49 GMT

I've updated the postcode data on the site with the latest ONS data. There are problems with the locations of 15 new Northern Irish postcodes, which I've removed for the moment. This is something of an improvement from the last release which initially misplaced all Northern Irish postcodes. If you spot any other problems, let me know

Land Registry data for July 2025

Chris Bell — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 19:32:50 GMT

Much quicker this month, England and Wales house price data for July 2025 is now on the site. More of the same, prices creeping up (although possibly going negative some time soon) and a low number of sales