How’s the Grid · Great Britain

Generation by fuel, interconnector flows, physical notifications, balancing acceptances, outage notices and wholesale prices come from the Elexon Insights Solution. Embedded wind and solar, which are not metered by the transmission system, come from the National Energy System Operator data portal. Carbon intensity comes from the Carbon Intensity API. Site coordinates and interconnector routes come from OpenStreetMap, the British coastline from NESO's grid supply point regions, and the neighbouring countries from Natural Earth.

• Contains BMRS data © Elexon Limited copyright and database right 2026, used under Elexon's licence to use BMRS open data.
• Supported by National Energy SO Open Data, used under the NESO Open Data Licence. NESO does not endorse this site.
• Carbon intensity data from the Carbon Intensity API, a project by the National Energy System Operator and the University of Oxford Department of Computer Science, used under CC BY 4.0.
• Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. The coordinate files this site generates from it — data/locations.js and data/links.js — are derived databases and are offered under the same licence.
• Country outlines from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain.

Elexon's fuel types stop at coal, gas, nuclear, wind, hydro, pumped storage and “other”, so batteries are invisible in the headline generation feed. This site rebuilds the fleet from the balancing mechanism unit register using three signals: the unit naming convention that marks storage units, registered unit names containing BESS or battery, and units whose physical notifications go meaningfully both ways once conventional two-way plant (pumped hydro and the interconnectors) has been excluded.

Directly registered units are counted with confidence. Aggregated units, where an optimiser trades a portfolio under one identifier, are separated out because a small amount of demand response is mixed in with the batteries. Turn them off with the switch above to see the conservative figure.

Batteries have no fuel type of their own, so the ones Elexon meters are bucketed into “other”. Comparing the reported other category against this site's own modelled battery discharge across 27 August 2026 gives other = 0.93 × discharge + 341 MW, with an R-squared of 0.908 over 46 half hours. In other words most of what the fuel feed calls other is batteries discharging, and roughly 58 per cent of that row was battery on the day tested.

That is the trap. Adding a battery row on top of the other row counts the same power twice, which is why a dashboard built on the fuel feed alone has to leave batteries blank rather than show a number it cannot separate. This page takes the modelled discharge back out of the other row so the battery row is additive rather than duplicated, and floors the result at zero so the correction can never make it negative. Charging needs no correction: it is demand, and never appears in the fuel feed at all.

A battery's position is set first by its own physical notification and then by any bid or offer the system operator accepts. Both are applied here, later acceptances overriding earlier ones, which is closer to real dispatch than physical notifications alone. Positive is discharging to the grid, negative is charging from it. Settlement-metered volumes arrive days later and will differ slightly.

The unit-level model tracks metered output closely for thermal plant and poorly for wind. Measured against the metered fuel totals across four settlement periods on 27 August 2026, gas came within 0.6 to 2.5 per cent, nuclear within 0.3 to 4.8, and biomass within 1.4. Wind ranged from 6 per cent below to 35 per cent above, so treat a wind farm's figure as the position it declared rather than the power it produced. Small hydro reads 19 to 26 per cent low because much of the fleet is not in the balancing mechanism at all.

There are no solar sites to show. Solar in Great Britain is overwhelmingly connected to distribution networks, so no solar farm registers as a balancing mechanism unit and the national solar figure on this page is an estimate rather than a sum of sites. The finest solar data that exists publicly is per grid supply point, not per farm.

No electricity feed carries a location, so coordinates are joined in from OpenStreetMap by name. A unit is matched either on its registered name or by reading its identifier as an abbreviation of a plant name, taking a prefix of each word in order, which is how DRAXX finds Drax and CNQPS finds Connah's Quay. A match is thrown out when OpenStreetMap's stated capacity is nothing like the unit's registered capacity, and a shortened identifier is only trusted when exactly one plant answers to it.

Units that match nothing are simply absent from the map, and the figure underneath it says how much of the fleet that leaves out. Sites appear once, with the units on them added together, so Drax is one circle rather than four.

Elexon reports a flow for every interconnector and names them, but says nothing about where the cables go. The routes are taken from OpenStreetMap, which has each one as a named submarine cable: every segment is collected, the two furthest apart points are treated as the ends, and whichever end is nearer the coastline is the British one. The only thing written into the build script is which cable name goes with which Elexon link, and that is checked — the foreign end has to land inside the country Elexon says the link reaches or the build stops.

Britain is drawn inside the map of Europe, zoomed into. Its coastline comes from Natural Earth at 1:10m, five times finer than the outline every other country on that map is drawn from, because the stations and the wires are placed from OpenStreetMap at full precision and a rougher coast leaves them standing offshore. Northern Ireland is drawn but carries no stations: it runs on the single electricity market with Ireland rather than on the Great Britain transmission system, which is why Moyle is an interconnector rather than an internal circuit.

Transmission lines draws the supergrid underneath it — every circuit OpenStreetMap has at 275 kV and above, which is the network the stations feed into. It is the one layer here carrying no reading at all: Elexon meters units and interconnectors, and nobody publishes a flow per circuit, so those lines never fade and never thicken. They are drawn as far as the map is tagged rather than in full, and the note under the map says how many circuits carry no voltage tag and so cannot be classed. A wind farm’s export cable is left out — that is one generator’s connection rather than the shared network, and the farm itself is already a circle.

Hovering a cable gives its name, which country it reaches, what it is carrying, its rated capacity and how hard it is working. Capacity comes from Elexon's own register rather than anywhere else, so the percentage is against the figure the market uses.

Arrows point the way the power is flowing, and are drawn thicker the harder the cable is working. The frame reaches far enough east for Jutland, so every cable now lands on the country it actually reaches rather than being cut off at the edge. IFA and ElecLink look short because OpenStreetMap holds only their near-shore segments, not the mid-Channel run.

Great Britain trades with six countries, and each of their system operators publishes data on its own terms. France's real-time mix is on the national open data portal, sends Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, and is read directly by your browser. Spain's Red Eléctrica and Norway's Statnett both publish openly but send no cross-origin headers, so a page like this cannot call them without a proxy relaying the request. Ireland's EirGrid dashboard service returned errors on every attempt while this was written.

Nothing here is scraped or guessed. A country either has a reachable feed and shows real numbers, or its card says why it does not.

France is drawn per region because that is the resolution its data exists at. There is no open per-station feed for France the way Elexon publishes one for Britain, so the power stations are a separate static layer you can switch on: 207 plants over 50 MW, placed and sized from OpenStreetMap. Those circles carry registered capacity, never live output, and they do not move with the feed. Filtering them to France matters more than it sounds — Overpass can only be asked for a rectangle, and a rectangle around France also holds Belgium, the Rhineland, Switzerland, northern Italy, Catalonia and the south coast of England. Every plant is tested against the French region polygons before it is kept.

Batteries connected below the transmission system and not registered in the balancing mechanism are not visible at all, and neither is domestic storage. The fleet registry is rebuilt from a multi-day scan rather than live, so a unit that energised this week may be missing until the next rebuild.