Behind the Christmas Lights: 12 Festive Facts from National Grid
From Christmas lights to Christmas dinner, many British festive traditions wouldn’t be possible without electricity. To celebrate the critical role electricity plays in powering Christmas, National Grid has released 12 dazzling 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.
From Christmas lights to Christmas dinner, many British festive traditions wouldn’t be possible without electricity. To celebrate the critical role electricity plays in powering Christmas, National Grid has released 12 dazzling 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.
1 - ‘Christmas Lights’ - If every UK household celebrating Christmas (approximately 25 million homes[1]) 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.
2 - ‘Rocking Around the Christmas Tree’ – 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.
3 - ‘Christmas 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.[2]
4 - It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’ - Since its launch on December 29, 2023, our latest, record-breaking interconnector Viking Link has exported enough electricity to bake around 4 billion mince pies!
5 - ‘O Christmas Tree’ – National Grid Electricity Distribution data experts have been crunching the numbers, and our data says demand for electricity rose by 15.5% last December[3] compared to 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 1st December, providing 36 days of twinkling lights until the twelfth night or 6th January.
6 - It’s a cracker! For a sprout-tacular fact... Did you know in the UK we buy approximately 750 million sprouts at Christmas time[4]? If you placed all those sprouts end to end, they’d cover approximately 15,000 miles. It would take our 900-strong ET Field Operations team just under 28 days to eat all 750 million sprouts giving a whole new meaning to a "power lunch"!
7 - ‘HO! HO! HO! – Who’d be a Turkey at Christmas’ – 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. To cook 8.5 million turkeys, it takes 63 GWh of energy, or enough energy 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!
8 - ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ - We Brits love our gadgets with 65% of people admitting that 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[5]. 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.
9 - ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ –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 worth of work!
10 - ‘Chestnuts Roasting on An Open Fire’? 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.
11 - ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ - 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, sound bars and phone chargers, leaving things on stand-by all adds up.
12 - ‘I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas’ -, for the first time last year (2023), renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) have exceeded 50% of the electricity production in GB on Christmas Day, compared to less than 1% on Christmas day in 2009.
ENDS
[1] Data on number of households celebrating Christmas sourced from Statista Christmas celebration among UK consumers 2022 | Statista
[2] Based on data from National Grid Electricity Distribution, covering the East and West Midlands, South West and Wales
[3] Data is sourced from National Grid Electricity Distribution, covering the East and West Midlands, South West and Wales
[4] Data on the number of sprouts purchased sourced from National Statistical The Twelve Stats of Christmas | National Statistical
[5] UK game console unit sales 2023 | Statista
