Great Britain’s electricity system, right now
What Great Britain is generating, using and importing, read from Elexon every five minutes, with the batteries drawn inside it.
Live · Elexon, read this minute
Where the power is coming from, and where it is going
Reading the flows.
Reading the system.
The flow as a table
The batteries, one by one
Reading the fleet.
Reading the fleet.
Open any one of them on its own, with its whole day drawn against the megawatts it is registered for, and what the register knows about it.
The last 24 hours
Reading the day.
Generation by fuel, stacked, with the demand the transmission system had to meet drawn over it. Beneath it, on the same clock, what the batteries did: above their line they are sending power out, below it they are taking it in.
The amber band is the one estimate here, and it explains the gap that opens in the middle of the day. Elexon meters the transmission system, and almost every British solar panel sits in a distribution network where the system operator never sees it, so solar comes from Sheffield Solar’s PV_Live instead: a live sample of monitored systems scaled up by installed capacity, half hourly against five minutes for everything else, with a 95% range, and revised after first publication. The demand line stays as Elexon publishes it, which is demand on the transmission system and is therefore already net of that solar. So when the stack rises above the line, the distance between them is roughly the power the panels are supplying that the system operator never has to deliver. Embedded wind does the same thing and is missing from both, because nothing publishes it live.
Frequency
Reading the frequency.
The last ten minutes, read every fifteen seconds. The target is 50.00 Hz and the shaded band is a tenth either side of it.
The cables
Reading the interconnectors.
Flow on each interconnector this minute. Imports to the right, exports to the left, in megawatts.
Generation by fuel from Elexon’s FUELINST, every five minutes. Frequency every fifteen seconds. Demand outturn every half hour. The battery fleet from Elexon notifications, every five minutes. Elexon publishes no line for batteries, so the fleet is read unit by unit from the balancing mechanism. Solar is not in the published mix at all, because almost every British panel is embedded in a distribution network and the system operator never meters it, so the solar band is an estimate from PV_Live, by Sheffield Solar at the University of Sheffield, which upscales a live sample of monitored systems by installed capacity and publishes a 95% range with every half hour. Embedded wind is missing for the same reason and is not estimated here, because nothing publishes it live. Nothing on this page is modelled. How the fleet is read