This is how much renewable energy Russell Group universities are producing

Russell Group universities produced 12.7m kilowatt hours (kWh) of renewable energy in the 2020/21 academic year. No idea what a kilowatt hour is? Neither did I until I googled it.

So a watt is obviously a unit of measurement for energy and a kilowatt is a thousand of them. A kilowatt hour is often used to measure energy consumption, with the unit meaning one kilowatt used over an hour period.

And Russell Group unis are collectively producing 12.7m kWh, according to new data provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

Ofgem estimates that an average house in the UK uses eight kWh of electricity every day. That means the Russell Group is producing enough renewable energy to provide 4.5k homes with electricity for a year.

For a sillier point of reference, the energy produced by the UK’s top unis would be enough to power an electric car to drive the length of the equator 1,584 times.

Some Russell Group universities are producing more renewable energy than others.

The University of Exeter produced the most renewable energy- 2.9m kWh in the the 2021 academic year.

They were shortly followed by The University of York (2.4m kWh) and The University of Sheffield (2.3m).

At the other end of the table are The University of Southampton and Queen’s University Belfast, who didn’t produce any renewable energy.

And then there’s the University of Birmingham- the only Russell Group university to not provide data on its renewable energy production. Who knows what they’re up to…

Anyway, here’s a full breakdown of the Russell Group universities generating the most and least renewable energy.

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