UK Electricity Generation Map

(energydashboard.co.uk)

141 points | by zeristor 12 hours ago ago

85 comments

  • unglaublich 11 hours ago

    Nice, and on a global and interconnect level there's:

    https://app.electricitymaps.com/

  • nonethewiser 10 hours ago

    Solar has a count of 1354 out of a total of 3047. So 44%.

    Solar accounts for ~5% of the actual output per https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity and https://www.renewableuk.com/news-and-resources/press-release...

    edit: change source from https://grid.iamkate.com/

    • tobylane 9 hours ago

      I see 16% now, and my own panels have jumped up to 400w since your comment, with a peak of 1500 earlier today. https://imgur.com/a/HOX6YJu

      While domestic installations are counted, they aren't in OP's link. https://www.projectsolaruk.com/blog/latest-uk-solar-photovol...

      • nonethewiser 8 hours ago

        Thanks for pointing that out - I guess I was a bit hasty with that source. It's not showing quite what I thought it was. Live data and percentages which can total more than 100%. Here is a better one that shows in 2023 solar was 4.7% of the overall electricity mix. And another source showing 5.2% in 2024.

        [0] https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity

        [1] https://www.renewableuk.com/news-and-resources/press-release...

        • Retric 3 hours ago

          So presumably ~6% in 2025, that seems excessive as the UK is such a horrible location for solar. However at such a low percentage across so many locations there’s no need for storage, minimal transmission losses, etc which presumably means it’s not actually a bad idea.

    • pixelesque 10 hours ago

      Huge offshore wind farms with hundreds of turbines are counted as single counts in this map though, so it's not really a compareable thing I don't think.

      • hopelite 2 hours ago

        What would be the point of that? It seems to be by complex. You would not count every single generator separately at a hydro plant, would you? Every single solar panel?

    • toomuchtodo 5 hours ago
    • ZeroGravitas 5 hours ago

      Yep, it's amazing how modular solar is. It's probably one of the biggest factors driving it down the cost curve and making it the primary source of energy for the human race going forward.

      You can buy single panels from the supermarket and plug them in on your balcony! That's amazing.

      And that modularity directly drives the competition which reduces the prices of the modules themselves and the many competing solar farms at many different scales racing to connect to the grid and delivering on or under budget on cost and time.

      What a time to be alive.

      • marcosscriven 2 hours ago

        I think another way of saying this is “commoditisation”.

    • maxmcd 9 hours ago

      I think this is the comparable view: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live

    • alkonaut 10 hours ago

      How is that surprising?

      • nonethewiser 10 hours ago

        Its not. Why do you ask?

        • alkonaut 10 hours ago

          or interesting? I mean, why did you point it out? Wasn't it roughly what one would think/expect?

    • mytailorisrich 9 hours ago

      It's the British weather.

      Today there is an Atlantic storm so most the the country is grey but with sunny periods and windy.

      In the depth of winter, solar only makes a contribution 3-4 hours per day, which kills the annual average.

  • HPsquared 11 hours ago

    Is there any way to turn off the animation? I'm getting about 5 FPS viewing on mobile.

    • arethuza 10 hours ago

      It's actually faster on my relatively new phone than on my ancient desktop!

      • dijit 2 hours ago

        fun fact, the marriage of hardware and phone browsers (especially iOS) allow full utilisation of floating point calculations for javascript (since every “number” is a float of course).

        ARM is literally tweaking CPUs to be better at running Javascript: for example ARMv8.3 added a new float-to-int instruction with errors and out-of-range values handled the way that JavaScript wants.

        Meaning, yes, typically, the most powerful devices for browsing the web are in fact phones.

        Webapps that perform fine on an iPhone 14 can cause the latest i9-14900k to choke.. It’s hilarious.

        This is part of why the Apple M-Series CPUs feel like magic. Lots of electron apps suddenly perform very well.

  • Podrod 10 hours ago

    Hah neat, didn't know there was a 15MW battery about 15 minute walk from me.

    Here's a kinda related site that I think is neat: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

  • newyankee 9 hours ago

    I really wish a simulated version with very granular transmission and distribution capacity for different type of producers and consumers, from large plants to individual houses to community solar or agrivoltaics could exist.

    This might be very helpful in understanding how to correctly allocate the infrastructure to enable distributed production at the right place. What kind of reversible flow is possible ? What types of electrical equipment is needed etc.

    I feel finally we are at a place where grid cost might be much higher than solar and batteries when amortized over 20-25 years.

  • dreamcompiler 9 hours ago

    TIL there are no coal plants in the UK. How long has this been true?

  • NooneAtAll3 an hour ago

    list of energy sources doesn't have scrollbar - so on a device with not enough screen height it's impossible to read the whole list without using browser zoom

  • 0xWTF 2 hours ago

    It would be nice if the totals included total power produced by the selected subset.

  • hk1337 9 hours ago

    Wind generation is king, apparently. I'm curious what the imports consist of, presumably natural gas but it's not indicated; however it doesn't seem to have that big of a reliance.

  • frou_dh 11 hours ago

    The main page https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live is just as interesting as the map that's linked to.

  • throw0101d 10 hours ago

    For those in Ontario, Canada, see perhaps:

    * https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

    * https://www.ieso.ca/market-data

    The output for individual generators is available at:

    * https://sygration.rodanenergy.com/gendata/today.html

    (AIUI, historical data available for a fee.)

  • wiz21c 11 hours ago

    Is it me or the size of the circles is proprtional to the installed capacity instead of the generated capacity (i.e. a 1200MW nuclear plant is as big as a 1200MW wind turbine, which seems not right to me)

    • rmccue 10 hours ago

      I don't think they're directly proportional, seems to be some sort of tailing off - Seagreen 1 (1075) and Torness (1200MW) seem to be a very similar size to Neart Na Gaoithe (450MW). (This could just appear similar because area of circles isn't a great way to visualise data though.)

    • nonethewiser 10 hours ago

      If so there is a very generous floor. Solar would probably not be visible if it was install capacity.

  • ajd555 8 hours ago

    This looks great! I've been planning on adding NYISO power data to the NYC Dashboard (https://dash.hudsonshipping.co), so this is very encouraging to see! I unfortunately don't think the US has such granular data - I love seeing the interconnectors to other countries.

  • divbzero 5 hours ago

    Are there electricity generation maps with the same level of granularity for other countries? Or is the UK unusual for providing data for each power plant?

  • alias_neo 10 hours ago

    Interesting that the city I live in has basically nothing apart from a single, relatively small "battery".

    I wonder, does residential solar with export count towards this sort of thing?

    Presumably residential export is fairly small relative to everything else, but anecdotally, I export enough daily to run another home the size of mine.

    EDIT: Clarify a sentence

  • Cthulhu_ 11 hours ago

    Related, in the Netherlands we have https://energieopwek.nl/ which shows a chart of power sources (not all are selected, press top right to add more) and shows that the vast majority of electricity is solar/wind, even in winter, with non-renewables being used as the baseline.

    • WJW 10 hours ago

      I don't think that's correct. It only shows renewable sources, and of those solar and wind are (obviously) the vast majority here in NL. But it's not even possible to enable showing coal and nuclear on that site, even though you can't convince me that they are literally not operating at all on a relatively cloudy day like this.

      Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be surprised if renewables were a majority of the grid these days. It's just that this dashboard contains insufficient information to conclude that.

  • CraigJPerry 11 hours ago

    Never realised just how much diversity of power generation there is on my doorstep in Lanarkshire. I live basically in the middle of nowhere, this is not a dense population centre although several of the sites are dedicated to industrial processes.

    Great presentation of this data, i just lost 15 mins satisfying curiosity. Thanks :-)

    • alimbada 8 hours ago

      I was in Dumfries/Ayrshire a few weeks ago. Came up from Manchester; saw so many wind farms on the way and during our visit, most of them after crossing the border.

    • arethuza 11 hours ago

      I was surprised to see a solar plant near Rhynie - but then again it will be in the rain shadow of the Cairngorms so probably reasonably sunny...

      Absolutely fascinating map!

      Edit: As I typed that I thought "Rhynie sounds a bit Welsh (British)" and I checked and it might be related to the old old phrases for "king" - which seems appropriate for a place with a huge ancient fortress looming over it.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhynie,_Aberdeenshire

  • boringg 7 hours ago

    Some kind of form of this energy data visualization shows up on hacker news every 6 months or so ... why is that?

  • ksec 9 hours ago

    Most of it is still Wind Farm on shore, how Off shore is not at least 50% of UK energy output is completely beyond me.

    • arethuza 9 hours ago

      The default view is for Operational sites - you can add other categories e.g. "Under Construction" which gives a view of the pipeline of new sites.

      There are a lot of offshore wind sites at various stages of construction/planning - some that are amongst the largest in the world.

  • nonethewiser 10 hours ago

    Why is there a battery category? That does not seem to fit with electricity GENERATION but I may be missing something.

    • jillesvangurp 3 hours ago

      Dispatchable power is probably a more neutral term than generation. The reason battery is included in tools like this is that there is a rapidly growing, non-trivial amount of dispatchable battery power on grids. Anything that excludes that is kind of not giving you the full picture. And of course this is widely expected to vastly increase in amount of dispatchable GW over the next years. It's early days.

      Dispatchable power is what matters if you are managing a grid. If you have lots of dispatchable power, you can deal with peaks and dips (both are valuable) in demand very rapidly and relatively cheaply. Long term, daily, and seasonal trends are fairly predictable. Even the weather is short term fairly predictable.

      Battery adds a lot of predictability to grids. If you have hours to plan for it, you can bring online gas if needed (coal and nuclear are not typically kept around in a mothballed state for this). If it's seconds, you are screwed because that is non dispatchable power (you need to plan to have it and spend money to get it online). That's the gap batteries fill.

      Anything with flywheels (gas, coal plants, etc.) needs time to (literally) spin up. And before that happens you first need to generate steam by boiling a large amount of cold water. Some gas plants can start relatively quickly but then run less efficiently. You can trade off dispatchability for efficiency. It means expending a lot of fuel just to get the thing started that otherwise delivers no power. They provide a lot of power once they are up and running but they are kind of useless when you need that power right away. And the more often you shut them down, the more you lose on spinning them up again.

    • estel 10 hours ago

      Generation might be a slight misnomer, but it's conceptually the same as pumped storage - grid capacity that can be called upon as necessary.

      • nonethewiser 9 hours ago

        I think you're right. I think its more like you say - grid capacity that can be called upon as necessary. Which is often from generators but not necessarily.

        The "interconnectors" are more evidence this isn't really about generators, but grid entry points. The interconnectors are connections to the French, Danish, etc. grids.

    • dannyfraser 10 hours ago

      Generation in this instance means power generation to meet consumption demand. Typically withdrawals from storage are counted as a source of supply to meet that demand regardless of the original source of the power in storage.

      • nonethewiser 10 hours ago

        So either the solar, wind, etc. datapoints are not being stored or they are double counting. It seems very unlikely all these solar, wind, etc. generators are not storing energy.

        • tobylane 9 hours ago

          It depends on what you're thinking of. No, the solar panels on my roof have no battery on the property. The wind turbines will have inertia, but no other store. I doubt the majority of the solar panel farms have batteries.

          • nonethewiser 9 hours ago

            Im thinking of generation

            • tobylane 9 hours ago

              It's an input to the grid. They will also be an output.

              • nonethewiser 8 hours ago

                Yeah input would be a better label I think.

    • infecto 10 hours ago

      A battery is a form generation. Ideally it soaks up power when not being used and then releases at peaks.

      • nonethewiser 9 hours ago

        A battery is a source of electricity. I think being a source is being conflated with being a generator. A battery does not generate electricity. It stores it.

        • infecto 9 hours ago

          You asked a question I tried to give you a reply. Most of the industry will classify it as a virtual generator. Happy to argue but not sure why you post a question and then refute answers.

          There is both a load and generator resource for a battery and is some markets it will register as such. So no it’s not creating net new but will often but bucketed in a generator category for the purposes of looking at mix.

          • nonethewiser 8 hours ago

            Im refuting the idea that a battery is a generator. Because its not for the reason I already differentiated.

            • infecto 8 hours ago

              You’re right that in the strict physics sense a battery doesn’t generate anything new. But in energy markets and system ops, classification is less about first principles and more about how resources interact with the grid. That’s why most ISOs/TSOs register a battery as both a load and a generator, it consumes on charge and supplies on discharge.

              So when people talk about the “generation mix,” batteries get bucketed alongside gas, wind, solar, etc. Not because they magically create energy, but because from the grid operator’s perspective they look like a dispatchable generator when discharging.

              It’s one of those cases where common-sense semantics (“it’s storage”) diverge from industry practice (“it’s modeled as generation”).

              Please let me know what’s confusing.

              • dannyfraser 8 hours ago

                This is correct. What's important for industry is understanding the energy balance, i.e. entries and exits to and from the grid. "Generation" is a catch-all term for grid entries.

                • nonethewiser 8 hours ago

                  So why not use the term grid entries? especially when there are also things like connections to other grids?

              • nonethewiser 8 hours ago

                I appreciate the context. Generation isnt the best name for an input to the grid. Perhaps you are right and it's common in the industry but I wouldn't expect non-industry people to anticipate batteries and connections to the Danish, French, etc. grids to be generators.

                And frankly I can't find evidence for the claim that the energy sector uses the term generation for inputs to the grid in general, as opposed to just the things literally generating electricity. Which does not surprise me.

  • cramcgrab 6 hours ago

    Wow! The app is just as fast as parliament!

  • alexnorton 10 hours ago

    See also the GB Renewables Map by Robin Hawkes which has a nice wind overlay:

    https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/

  • lloydatkinson 4 hours ago

    Always impressed with these because the disjointed energy APIs that exist in the UK are quit honestly the worst APIs I’ve ever had the misfortune of trying to use.

  • bparsons 9 hours ago

    The minimalist Alberta Electricity System Operator dashboard is far superior:

    http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle...

  • gdubya 11 hours ago

    Very interesting! Who made this?

    • dannyfraser 10 hours ago

      A bit of digging in the T&Cs, Companies House, and LinkedIn pointed me to an individual working for the NHS who has put this together as a side project.

      I work in this space (https://www.woodmac.com/), mostly with natural gas data but have worked on power in the past so I'm always interested to see if it's anyone I know (in this case it isn't).

      Building something like this isn't really that difficult - all of the data is publicly accessible and if you can transform it and pull it into a database and build a front-end app then you're pretty much there. The developer has stated that the main source for this is https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/, but other good sources of energy data (across Europe) are https://transparency.entsoe.eu/ for power and https://transparency.entsog.eu/ for gas. Also useful are https://alsi.gie.eu/ for LNG imports and https://agsi.gie.eu/ for gas storage.

    • zeristor 10 hours ago

      I don’t know.

      I had noticed the Norway interconnect was running at 0 MW, and I was trying different sites to see if it was the data feed.

      It wasn’t, it seems Norway NO2 area has 50% water levels in its hydro dams, the rest seem OK but NO2 region is the one which exports power to UK, Germany, and Denmark.

      The little animations of power moving along lines are very cool.

  • drcongo 11 hours ago

    This is excellent. Led me to discover this mini hydro generator: https://courtfarmdorset.co.uk/water-wheel/

    • mnw21cam 10 hours ago

      Just a minute while I cringe at the units.

      • haltcatchfire 10 hours ago

        > Yes, the water wheel will generate electricity all year round. In winter, it produces between 120 and 170 kWh per 24-hour period, with peak generation reaching up to 11 kW per hour. In summer, it generates between 3 and 5 kW per hour.

        Seems like a nice complement with solar, given that they peak at each others inverse.

      • dreamcompiler 9 hours ago

        I've seen worse.

        But yeah, "11 kW per hour" is meaningless.

        • dreamcompiler 9 hours ago

          Unless they're talking about the second derivative of energy I suppose: "My energy accelerates at 11kWh per hour per hour!"

          Which is not a thing anybody ever does. Oh wait, it matters for peaking power plants and Marx generators but there you'd use Joules/sec/sec rather than kWh/h/h.

          • tialaramex 3 hours ago

            Surely in that world you're mostly working with latency not some sort of "acceleration". 10 outfits who can each deliver 100MW in 5-10 seconds, does not give you 100MW in a second, it gives you 1GW in 5-10 seconds.

    • petesergeant 10 hours ago

      for some reason I thought this would look much more bucolic than it does

      • arethuza 9 hours ago

        Ironically, hydro power causes a lot of environmental problems - a lot of glens in the Scottish highlands have had ugly roads bulldozed up them to install fairly small hydro schemes. Maybe this is worth it overall, but they can certainly be terrible to look at.

  • komali2 8 hours ago

    We have this in Taiwan but it's uglier and some moron put `user-select: none` on the table. But anyway: https://www.taipower.com.tw/d006/loadGraph/loadGraph/genshx_...