What Grid shows now: GB electricity, adding up

I wrote about why I started Grid in an earlier post. This one is about what it does now, and what has changed since.

What Grid shows

Grid is a public dashboard of Great Britain's electricity system, updated every half-hour. It shows:

• generation by source
• imports and exports
• carbon intensity
• the power price
• demand and wind forecasts
• records

The aim is to answer simple questions quickly. Where is our power coming from? How clean is it? What happens over the next day or two?

The balance adds up

The new headline card shows how the system balances:

generation + imports − exports − storage charging = demand

I added it because a single generation chart can mislead. Power flows in and out of Great Britain through interconnectors, and some of what is generated goes into charging storage rather than meeting demand. Showing every term together means the numbers on the page reconcile with each other, and you can see why demand and generation are rarely the same figure.

It also keeps me honest. If the card doesn't add up, something in the data or in my code is wrong, and I'd rather see that on the page than hide it.

Data sources and the API

The data comes from Elexon, NESO and Sheffield Solar, and every source is credited on the site. Grid is my own side project; it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. I just make their published data easier to read in one place.

There's also a free public JSON API, so if you want the same figures in your own notebook, chart or tool, you don't need to scrape anything.

What's next

The next big piece is an infrastructure map of Great Britain's power assets. There's no date yet; I'll write about it when it's ready.

If you use Grid and something is unclear or looks wrong, I'd like to hear about it: me@vahaah.com.