UK Electricity Generation Map

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

zeristor

175 points

98 comments

energydashboard.co.ukResearchstoryHigh profile

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Energy

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Renewable Energy

The UK Electricity Generation Map provides a detailed and interactive visualization of the UK's electricity generation infrastructure, sparking discussion on the country's energy mix and the role of renewables.

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Discussion (98 comments)

Showing 98 comments

unglaublich

4 months ago

1 reply

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

https://app.electricitymaps.com/

4 months ago

I am also a fan of RTE (French electricity distribution network) live website: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...

CraigJPerry

4 months ago

2 replies

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

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

pjc50

4 months ago

The Conservative government banned new onshore wind in England for some years, hence the difference. There's now plenty of wind power in Scotland and a shortage of transmission capacity.

arethuza

4 months 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

wiz21c

4 months ago

2 replies

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

4 months 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

4 months ago

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

drcongo

4 months ago

2 replies

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

mnw21cam

4 months ago

2 replies

Just a minute while I cringe at the units.

haltcatchfire

4 months ago

1 reply

> 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.

mnw21cam

4 months ago

"kW per hour"

dreamcompiler

4 months ago

1 reply

I've seen worse.

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

dreamcompiler

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months 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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

arethuza

4 months 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.

gdubya

4 months ago

2 replies

Very interesting! Who made this?

dannyfraser

4 months 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.

zeristorAuthor

4 months 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.

HPsquared

4 months ago

2 replies

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

arethuza

4 months ago

1 reply

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

dijit

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

arethuza

4 months ago

1 reply

Yeah, my phone is a iPhone 15 Pro and my desktop PC is an i7-4790

dijit

4 months ago

Well, that's a 1.5-2y old phone vs a 11-12 year old PC.

Also, I had that same CPU, it was a beast. :)

I meant the other way, years old phones are trouncing brand new top of line CPUs.

user____name

4 months ago

I got about 0.5 FPS on my iPhone 15. Yikes.

Cthulhu_

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months 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.

nonethewiser

4 months ago

7 replies

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/

alkonaut

4 months ago

1 reply

How is that surprising?

nonethewiser

4 months ago

1 reply

Its not. Why do you ask?

alkonaut

4 months ago

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

pixelesque

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months 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?

tobylane

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months 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.

ZeroGravitas

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

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

maxmcd

4 months ago

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

mytailorisrich

4 months 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.

toomuchtodo

4 months ago

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/solar-photovoltaics...

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/28/strongest-year-on-rec...

nonethewiser

4 months ago

4 replies

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

estel

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months 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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

1 reply

Im thinking of generation

tobylane

4 months ago

1 reply

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

nonethewiser

4 months ago

Yeah input would be a better label I think.

infecto

4 months ago

1 reply

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

nonethewiser

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

infecto

4 months ago

2 replies

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

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

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

nonethewiser

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

infecto

4 months ago

1 reply

Go look at any of the hundreds of energy dashboards. Batteries are both a source and use when thinking about fuel mix. You might not understand it but for most of the world we understand batteries are not magic.

nonethewiser

4 months ago

1 reply

>Batteries are both a source and use when thinking about fuel mix

That doesnt make them a generator. Other grids are sources of energy as well. Are they generators?

Again, I see absolutely nothing published anywhere classifying batteries as generators. It's a source. It's an input into the grid. But how can you argue all grid inputs are considered a generator, therefor batteries are generators? You seem quite alone in that.

infecto

4 months ago

You’re hung up on semantics. In practice, ISOs/TSOs report batteries in the generation mix because when they discharge, they inject MW just like any other generator. Interconnectors are treated the same way — not because they “generate,” but because they’re modeled as supply.

If you don’t like the terminology, take it up with the grid operators. That’s how the industry classifies it, whether you agree with the wording or not.

Again, I have no idea what you are trying to argue. We all understand how batteries work, yes they are not magic. From a fuel mix perspective or “generation” perspective they are lumped together. Most folks who are looking at this data recognize batteries are not magic, not sure why you are hung up on this.

jillesvangurp

4 months 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.

throw0101d

4 months ago

1 reply

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.)

slavik81

4 months ago

The Alberta Current Supply Demand Report: http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle...

alias_neo

4 months ago

1 reply

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

ZenoArrow

4 months ago

1 reply

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

It isn't displayed on this website, or at least not all of them, I checked by looking for an installation that I know exists that is on a feed in tariff and it wasn't shown.

To be fair to the creators of this website, it's probably quite hard to gather and display this type of residential solar information.

alias_neo

4 months ago

I agree the display part is probably challenging, the exact location likely isn't recorded and the density could make it an issue to show on the map; regarding collecting it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't some public-ish record of it somewhere, we do all have to register with the DNO etc as micro-generators so it'd be interesting to know if someone makes an API with that information available.

Aside from that, my real wonder was whether residential solar is factored into national renewables or if it's simply too little to be worth it.

newyankee

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

scrlk

4 months ago

1 reply

The Estonian transmission system operator (Elering) has built this: https://youtu.be/NFuXzu-GIPo?t=51

newyankee

4 months ago

thanks, that looks quite interesting. Probably Estonia's push to be a true e-state has something to do with it, as the markets become larger transparency possibly becomes a liability for incumbent utility companies who will not like it

dreamcompiler

4 months ago

4 replies

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

pjc50

4 months ago

1 reply

There's a slight fudge: the largest coal plant, Drax, is still in operation - burning wood pellets imported from the US and Canada. In theory this is CO2-neutral. But it could go back to coal in an emergency with some enabling legislation.

_mlbt

4 months ago

How do they import these wood pellets? Is it fossil fuel powered ships? Is that factored in to the CO2 neutrality?

toomuchtodo

4 months ago

Britain's last coal-fired power plant shuts down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41734993 - October 2024 (95 comments)

UK to finish with coal power after 142 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695587 - September 2024 (63 comments)

Britain's reliance on coal-fired power set to end after 140 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443347 - September 2024 (70 comments)

arethuza

4 months ago

Last year:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o

Liftyee

4 months ago

The last coal power plant was shut down in late 2024. I remember checking the grid power stats before then and often seeing 0 MW of coal generated power.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o

hk1337

4 months ago

3 replies

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.

frameset

4 months ago

We import from France mostly, via the interconnects between our countries' grids. That means it's probably mostly nuclear.

arethuza

4 months ago

I think the imports refer to power transfers to/from other countries along interconnectors?

https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-ventures/intercon...

ZeroGravitas

4 months ago

The electricity maps site calculates the carbon intensity of the grid imports and lists it on the map and the country specifically views (click for more info):

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly

As a general rule, the imports are imported because they are cheaper and generally cheaper means cleaner.

ksec

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months 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.

divbzero

4 months ago

1 reply

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?

nikcub

4 months ago

here's Australia:

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/

lloydatkinson

4 months 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.

0xWTF

4 months ago

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

cramcgrab

4 months ago

Wow! The app is just as fast as parliament!

alexnorton

4 months ago

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

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

Podrod

4 months 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/

NooneAtAll3

4 months 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

lolc

4 months ago

Apparently there's a 400 MW flywheel near Oxford! It's listed as battery which is close enough I guess.

boringg

4 months ago

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

ajd555

4 months 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.

komali2

4 months 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_...

frou_dh

4 months ago

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

bparsons

4 months ago

The minimalist Alberta Electricity System Operator dashboard is far superior:

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

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