Electricity, as it flows.
UK Grid is a real-time view of the British electricity system — generation by fuel, demand, wholesale price, carbon intensity, interconnector flows, and regional carbon — refreshed every 5 minutes from the upstream operators.
Why it exists
Every metric on this site is already published by the people who run the grid. But it's published across three different APIs, in three different formats, at three different cadences, and most of the existing dashboards are either commercial-looking or confusing. This is an attempt at the simplest possible answer to "what's happening on the British grid right now, in numbers I can actually read?"
How it works
A scheduled job runs every 5 minutes in
europe-west2:
- It pulls the last 90 minutes from Elexon (FUELINST + Market Index Price), the Carbon Intensity API (national + regional), and NESO (demand CSV).
- It normalises everything to half-hourly settlement periods (the British grid's canonical time unit).
- It writes the live snapshot and the most recent three settlement periods to Firestore.
- Your browser subscribes via WebSocket and the UI updates the moment new data lands — no polling, no page reloads.
A second job runs daily at 03:30 UTC to backfill any half-hour that didn't get a complete write (late publication, transient API failure, that kind of thing). The whole thing is open source — see the repository for the actual code.
What it shows
| Card | Source | Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Generation mix (by fuel, plus embedded wind & solar) | Elexon BMRS — FUELINST | 5 min |
| Wholesale price | Elexon BMRS — Market Index Price (APXMIDP) | 30 min (10–25 min lag) |
| Carbon intensity (national) | Carbon Intensity API | 30 min (forecast immediate, actual ~30–60 min later) |
| Demand (national) | NESO ND (actual) or derived from generation + interconnectors | 30 min authoritative · 5 min derived |
| Interconnectors (10 cables, 6 countries) | Elexon BMRS — FUELINST | 5 min |
| Regional carbon (18 DNO regions) | Carbon Intensity regional API | 30 min |
Each card on the dashboard has a small i button —
tap it for a deeper explanation of what the number means, how it's
calculated, and the typical publish lag.
Who built it
UK Grid is a project of Andelle Labs. It's not a commercial product; there's no roadmap of features being sold to anyone. It exists because the data is there and someone should make it pleasant to look at.
Feedback & bugs
Open an issue on GitHub or email hello@andelle.co.