Ireland and Northern Ireland’s electricity system, right now
What the island is generating, using and importing, read from EirGrid and SONI every quarter hour, with every battery in the all-island market drawn inside it at its latest instruction from the control room.
Live · EirGrid’s dashboard and SEMO, 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.
The 27 units SEMO registers as battery storage, 1.0 GW, plus Golagh, which it files as multi-fuel. The island is centrally dispatched: the control room sends every unit an instruction with a megawatt set point, which the unit holds until the next one, and a set point below nought is an order to charge. So a bar here is not a meter reading and not the owner’s plan; it is what the unit was last told to do. The owner’s own plan for each unit is published by SEMO the next morning, and the meter the day after, and both are kept.
The last 24 hours
Reading the day.
Wind, solar and everything else generated on the island, stacked, with the cables beneath them and the system demand drawn over the top. Beneath it, on the same clock, what the batteries were told to do: above their line they are sending power out, below it they are taking it in.
EirGrid publishes no fuel split for the quarter hour, only for the day so far, so everything that is not wind or solar is one band, “other generation”, which on the island is mostly gas with some coal, peat, hydro and biomass. Wind and solar are EirGrid’s own estimates, because part of each sits in the distribution networks where the operators read it from samples and installed capacity rather than meters; the figure says so wherever it appears. The cables sit at the bottom of the stack because they are steady and large, about a fifth of the island’s power on an ordinary day, which is why the demand line would otherwise sit well above the generation.
Frequency
Reading the frequency.
The last ten minutes EirGrid has published, read every fifteen seconds from its five second record. The target is 50.00 Hz and the shaded band is a tenth either side of it. The island is a small synchronous system of its own, so the frequency moves more than Great Britain’s does.
The cables
Reading the interconnectors.
Flow on each interconnector this quarter hour. Imports to the right, exports to the left, in megawatts. East West and Greenlink land in Wales; Moyle lands in Scotland.
System demand, generation, wind, solar and the cables from EirGrid’s Smart Grid Dashboard, the operators’ own feed for Ireland and Northern Ireland together, published a quarter hour at a time about a quarter of an hour behind the clock. Frequency from the same feed, every five seconds, in the same quarter hourly batches. The batteries from SEMO’s hourly dispatch instructions report, each unit’s latest instructions read one unit at a time from SEMO’s reports service, and the five minute imbalance price from the same service. Nothing on this page is modelled. Supported by EirGrid Group Data, under the EirGrid Group open data licence.