Where Britain's power is coming from right now

Each cable's name opens its own page, with its last 7 days. All of Britain's interconnectors, live →

How live is this?

The pie updates every half hour because Britain's true national mix includes the solar power made on rooftops and in fields — which isn't metered directly, so it's published once per half-hour settlement period by NESO, the National Energy System Operator (formerly National Grid ESO).

Demand and interconnector flows update every 5 minutes — that's Elexon's FUELINST feed, about as close to real time as public GB grid data gets. It only covers large transmission-connected stations, so it leaves out solar. Flip the pie to “Transmission · 5-min” to see that faster, solar-free view.

Carbon intensity is NESO's half-hourly figure for the grams of CO₂ behind every kilowatt-hour you use.

In the National view the mix is published only as percentages, so the power (GW) in each tooltip is estimated — the share applied to Britain's live total output (including the embedded solar and wind that isn't transmission-metered). In the Transmission view the GW figures are exact, straight from the 5-minute feed.

By company / power station / wind farm groups live per-unit output (Elexon Physical Notifications) using the BM Unit register that maps each unit to its owner, station and fuel. It covers transmission-connected generators — the big stations like Drax and Sizewell and the major wind farms (London Array, Hornsea, Dogger Bank…) — so shares are of transmission-metered output, and smaller embedded units aren't included. The wind-farm view lists every metered farm and how hard it's running versus its capacity, and its By owner toggle rolls the farms up to their parent company (Ørsted, SSE, RWE, ScottishPower, Vattenfall, Ocean Winds…) — approximate, since many are joint ventures, so it shows the operator or majority owner. Solar farm shows the eight solar farms that report their own output; every other solar farm, and every rooftop, is counted inside a supplier's figures.

The Map switch shows Fuel, Wind farm or Solar farm on a map of Britain. On the Fuel map every power station, wind farm, solar farm and interconnector that GridMonkey can place is a circle, its area what it is generating right now and its colour its fuel, as in the pie; a hollow circle is taking power in (a battery charging, pumped storage pumping, a cable exporting); each interconnector is also a dotted line toward the country at its other end (its flag at the line's end), its dots moving toward Britain while it imports and away while it exports (faster the harder it is running; still and grey when it is idle); and the mix itself sits beside it as a small pie (the National mix still includes the rooftop solar and small generators that don't report one by one; Transmission is the metered stations only). The wind and solar maps size each farm by its capacity and colour it by how hard it is running. Positions are the government's (the Renewable Energy Planning Database and DUKES) or, where neither lists a station, OpenStreetMap's.

The best-time forecast is NESO's own carbon intensity forecast, 48 hours ahead and updated every half hour, for Great Britain or for the grid region your postcode is in (there are 14, and they differ a lot: the south of England leans on imports and gas far more than Scotland). It finds the cleanest run of 1 to 4 hours in the next 24.

Leaving it on a screen? Display mode shows the pie, the headline figures and the forecast full-screen, keeps the screen awake and refreshes on its own. Tap the screen, move the mouse or press a key there and the switches appear (the group; Pie, Map or Europe; National or Transmission), then hide again a few seconds later. With a keyboard, 1 to 5 choose the group, P, M and E the view and N and T the source, and ← and → step through the views.

Add to calendar downloads the cleanest window as a calendar event with a reminder five minutes before. Daily alert sends a notification when the day's cleanest run starts (between 7am and 10pm, for Great Britain or your region). Turning it on stores only your browser's notification address, the region and the length you chose, and nothing that identifies you; turning it off deletes them.

Agile prices come from Octopus Energy's public price list for your region. The cheapest and the cleanest hours often line up, because both follow the wind and the sun, but not always; the price chart sits under the carbon one on the same timeline so you can see where they differ.

Carbon by region is NESO's estimate for each of the 14 distribution regions. Records come from GridMonkey's own copy of NESO's half-hourly figures, kept since 17 October 2026 and filled back to May 2018. Every wind farm also has its own page with its live output and last 7 days (and they are all on a live map), and so does every big power station (nuclear, gas, biomass, hydro, pumped storage and batteries), each of the solar farms big enough to report their own output, and each of Britain's interconnectors. League tables rank the wind farms and the power stations by load factor. The monthly reports sum up each month since 2018, and the GridMonkey API gives the cleanest time to any website or smart home.