Energy Use in Your Area

National energy averages are almost useless for working out whether your own bills are reasonable. A city centre of flats and a rural district of large detached houses both sit inside the same national figure, and neither looks anything like it.

This page pulls together official datasets for a single local authority: how much electricity and gas homes there use, how they are heated, how efficient the housing stock is, how far smart meters and heat pump grants have reached, where registered heat-network energy centres sit, and how much fuel poverty the area has.

Find your area

Enter a postcode and we look up the local authority it belongs to.

The postcode is not stored. It is sent in the body of a single lookup request, resolved to an area code, and discarded — it never appears in the URL, is never written to a log or database, and is never passed to analytics. Only the area code travels onward, and it is checked against the official geographies we hold before anything is shown.

How much energy your area uses

These are mean annual consumption figures per metered domestic property, from the Government’s sub-national energy statistics. Electricity and gas are counted separately and neither is an estimate for any particular home.

Gas figures come weather-corrected, so a mild year is not mistaken for a sudden outbreak of efficiency. Where too few properties in an area are connected for a figure to be published without identifying households, the value is suppressed — and shown here as unavailable rather than as zero, because “not published” and “none” are different statements.

From your postcode upwards

Everything above this point describes a council area. The Government also publishes the same measure at four finer geographies, down to the individual postcode — around fifteen homes nationally, though it varies a great deal. The table below shows all of them at once, finest first, so you can see how quickly the picture changes as the area shrinks.

Two things are worth knowing before you read it. A blank row is not a zero.Where too few meters sit in a postcode to publish a figure without identifying households, DESNZ leaves the row out of the file altogether — so “suppressed” and “never published” look identical from here, and neither means no energy was used. We do not fill those gaps with the figure from the larger area, because that would put a district’s number under a postcode’s label.

And none of these is a measurement of your house. The postcode figure is a modelled estimate for the meters in it. On a street of fifteen homes, one badly insulated house or one heat pump moves the average noticeably, and the figure still tells you nothing about which house that is.

What that energy puts into the air

Everything above this point is measured in kilowatt hours. This is measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and the two are not interchangeable — the same kilowatt hour of gas and of electricity carry different amounts of carbon, and the electricity figure falls every year as the grid gets cleaner without anyone changing what they do at home.

One thing decides how to read the figures below. These are territorial emissions.They count what is released inside the area’s boundary, not the carbon footprint of the people who live there. Emissions from generating the electricity an area uses are moved back to that area, so a power station does not land on the council that happens to host it — but emissions from making goods somewhere else and shipping them in are not counted here at all. An area with heavy industry carries it; an area that imports what it consumes looks clean.

How the homes around you are heated

Central heating type comes from the Census, which asks every household rather than sampling. It is the most complete picture available of what is actually heating British homes, and it explains a great deal about an area’s consumption figures.

An area with many homes off the gas grid — heating with electricity, oil or solid fuel — will show low gas use and high electricity use, and the households in it typically pay more for the same warmth. That is a different situation from an area that simply uses less energy.

England and Wales and Scotland ran their censuses in different years with different categories, so the two are shown separately and never combined into one Great Britain figure.

Homes with no gas connection at all

Around one household in six in Great Britain has no gas meter. For those homes the price cap on gas is irrelevant, heating comes from oil, LPG, solid fuel or electricity, and the case for a heat pump is usually stronger than anywhere else. In parts of the Highlands and rural Wales it is most of the housing stock, not a minority of it.

Two things below are worth reading carefully. The off-grid count is modelled by subtracting domestic gas meters from domestic properties, so it cannot tell a house with no gas in the street from one that simply never connected — and where an area records more meters than properties, DESNZ publishes a zero rather than a negative, which means “no estimate” and not “none”. The residual fuel figure counts every non-gas, non-electricity, non-transport fuel burned in the area, including by farms and factories. Neither is a statement about any particular house, and the two must not be divided into one another.

How efficient the local housing stock is

EPC bands, smart meter coverage and heat pump grant uptake each say something about how ready an area’s homes are for cheaper, lower carbon heating.

One caveat matters throughout: an EPC is produced when a property is sold or let, so the register covers transacted homes rather than all homes. Areas with low turnover — long-held family houses, stable social housing — are under-represented, and the band distribution skews toward whatever has changed hands recently. It is a real signal, not a census.

What is already connected to your local network

The grants and certificates above count what was paid for. The two network views below answer different questions: one counts solar panels, heat pumps, batteries and EV chargers recorded against network connections, while the other models whether a property would need an investigation before connecting new low-carbon equipment.

Read the coverage line before the numbers. Northern Powergrid publishes recorded connections by postcode district in the North East, Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire. Electricity North West publishes a different desktop-readiness assessment by postcode sector. Northern Powergrid connection counts and Electricity North West readiness assessments do not share a denominator and must not be compared. Everywhere else, the honest answer is that nobody has published either local view, which is different from nobody having a heat pump or a suitable connection.

And these are connections the network operator knows about, not a census. In its November 2025 register release Northern Powergrid recorded 157,102 solar installations and 756 batteries; that gap says more about what gets notified to a network operator than about what is fitted in people’s homes.

Fuel poverty, and why the three nations differ

Fuel poverty is where energy statistics stop being an abstraction. It measures households that cannot afford to keep warm — and it is measured differently in each nation of Great Britain.

England uses a Low Income Low Energy Efficiency measure, which counts a household as fuel poor if it is on a low income and lives in a property below a given efficiency band. Scotland and Wales use their own definitions, built around what proportion of income energy costs consume.

These are not variations on one measure. They answer different questions, and a household could be counted in one nation and not in another with identical circumstances. So the figures below are shown per nation and we refuse to compute a Great Britain rate from them, because any such number would be arithmetic performed on incompatible definitions.

The price cap where you live

Everything above this point is measured by council area. The price cap is not. Ofgem sets it separately for each of the fourteen electricity distribution regions, and those regions do not follow council or county boundaries — Banbury sits in the South East for statistical purposes and takes its electricity from the West Midlands region, which is a different cap and a different unit rate.

That is why the cap only appears once a postcode has been entered. A council can straddle two regions, so choosing one from the list is not enough to know which cap applies, and showing the wrong region’s prices would be worse than showing none.

Your electricity network

Your supplier sends the bill, but it does not run the wires. The distribution network operator owns and maintains the local cables, substations and poles, and is the company responsible for restoring power after a cut. It is determined by where the property is, not by the energy supplier you choose.

A council can span more than one electricity distribution region, so this section uses a postcode-resolved region and never guesses the operator from the selected council alone.

How clean your electricity is right now

Carbon intensity is published for the same fourteen distribution regions and updates every half hour, so it is the one figure on this page that describes this moment rather than a past year. Areas with a lot of nearby wind or nuclear can sit far below the national average for hours at a time.

If you are on a tariff whose price moves through the day, the cheap hours and the clean hours are usually the same hours.

Charge points and projects nearby

Public charge points are counted by council area, so the per-head figure is the useful one: a large rural authority and a dense urban one can report similar totals while being nothing alike to live in.

The generation and storage projects below come from the planning register and include everything from operational solar farms to applications that were refused. A project only appears if the register recorded a council code against it, and many older entries did not, so the counts are a floor rather than a total.

Who you buy from

The figures above describe the homes around you. This one does not vary by area at all — supplier ratings and complaint records are national — but it answers the other half of the question most people arrive with, which is whether the company sending the bill is any good.

Supplier prices do vary by electricity region. We hold their published tariffs for one region only, so there is no regional price table here; the regional figure worth having is the price cap above, which is the ceiling every standard tariff in your region sits under.

An area average is not your house

Every figure on this page describes a local authority — often hundreds of thousands of people — and within one the spread is enormous.

Sitting above your area’s average is common and not in itself a problem, particularly if your home is larger or more exposed than the local norm. The comparison worth making is against homes like yours rather than against your neighbours in aggregate, which is what typical household energy use is for — it breaks consumption down by property type, size, age and tenure.

To turn any of these consumption figures into money, put them through the energy bill calculator with the price cap rates for your region. And if your area looks heavy on electric heating, it is worth reading about air source heat pumps and the grants tracked on our solar and heat pump page.