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Electricity used (or demand, as it is known in the industry) is what Britain is drawing from the grid right now: homes, businesses, transport, everything. Generation is what power stations, wind farms, and solar panels are producing. The two are never quite equal, because electricity also flows in and out through the undersea cables to Europe. On this page the figures balance exactly: demand = generation + net transfers, where net transfers is imports minus exports. Pumped-storage hydro sits inside the generation figure, not alongside it. It counts as positive while releasing water to generate, and negative while pumping water back uphill and drawing power from the grid. That is why generation dips when the pumps are running.
Embedded generation is the part that is hardest to see. Large power stations feed directly into the national transmission network and are precisely metered. But rooftop solar, small wind farms, and community hydro feed into local distribution networks and are never measured directly; only estimated. This site combines both metered and estimated output into the single generation figure, which is why the numbers can look slightly different from figures published elsewhere.
Why our figure is higher than NESO's. The National Energy System Operator publishes a "National Demand" figure that deliberately excludes embedded generation: a house running on its own solar simply looks like less demand to the transmission system. Our total typically runs 4–5 GW higher because we include that embedded layer. Both figures are correct; they answer different questions. The gap is almost entirely embedded solar on sunny afternoons.
Self-sufficiency is the percentage of demand being met by domestic generation at this moment. A reading of 100% means Great Britain is producing exactly as much electricity as it is consuming from its own generators. Above 100% means the grid is a net exporter; below 100% means imports are making up the shortfall. The figure tends to be highest on windy summer days and lowest on cold, still winter mornings when heating demand peaks and solar output is minimal.
The map is the centrepiece of the page. It shows three overlapping layers, each toggled by the buttons above it.
The carbon intensity layer colours each of Britain's 14 distribution regions from green (low carbon) to red (high carbon), based on the mix of generation serving that area. Click any region to see its current reading in gCO₂/kWh. More on carbon intensity.
The interconnector layer draws the ten undersea cables connecting Britain to neighbouring countries, coloured blue for imports flowing in and amber for exports flowing out. More on interconnectors.
The power cuts layer places a marker at the approximate centre of each reported outage, colour-coded by Distribution Network Operator. Cluster numbers expand as you zoom in. More on power cuts.
Why 14 regions but seven operators? The 14 are distribution licence areas, not companies. Six operators hold all 14 between them, several holding more than one. The seventh is NIE Networks: Northern Ireland runs on a separate grid, so it has no carbon intensity region and is never coloured, though its power cuts still appear.
Carbon intensity is grams of CO₂ emitted for every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed. It rises when gas turbines are doing most of the work and falls when wind, nuclear, and solar are plentiful. A figure around 50 means the grid is running almost entirely on low-carbon sources; above 250 means gas is carrying most of the load.
The UK's annual average has fallen from around 250 gCO₂/kWh in 2019 to under 150 now, driven mainly by the growth of offshore wind and the retirement of coal (which ended permanently on 30 September 2024). The number fluctuates hour by hour as wind output changes, which is why the "good time to use electricity?" signal checks the current reading against the forecast for the next 24 hours.
The data comes from the Carbon Intensity API, developed by NESO and the University of Oxford. It uses a combination of real generation data and a dispatch model to estimate emissions from each fuel type.
The price shown is the market index price for GB electricity: the volume weighted average of the short-term wholesale trades made for delivery in the current half-hour settlement period. It is not what households pay. Retail tariffs add network charges, supplier margins, policy levies, and VAT on top, which typically adds £50–£150/MWh to what consumers actually see on their bills.
The wholesale figure is useful as a signal. Very high prices mean expensive generating plant, usually open-cycle gas turbines, is running at the margin to meet demand, often on cold, still days with little wind. Very low or negative prices typically mean renewable output is high relative to demand; generators may pay to offload surplus electricity rather than curtail it. The data comes from Elexon's Market Index Data (MID) service, which carries two index providers. We take the APX index: the other, N2EX, reports 0.00 for almost every period, so including it would halve the figure.
The signals section gives a one-line answer to each of the five questions a curious person might ask about the grid right now. Here is what each one is measuring.
Britain is connected to its neighbours by high-voltage direct-current cables laid under the sea. A ← arrow (import) means electricity is flowing into Britain; a → arrow (export) means it is flowing out. The percentage measures each cable's flow against British demand. For an importing cable that is the share of demand it is meeting; for an exporting cable, an equivalent share being sent out. Cables showing nothing are below 10 MW in either direction and are filtered out as noise.
Flows are driven by the relative wholesale price between markets. When British prices are high (typically on cold, still days), imports rise. When wind is strong and prices are low, Britain often exports. All ten active cables:
If you are in a power cut right now, call 105. It is free from any phone, mobile or landline, and connects you straight to the network operator for your area. They can tell you what is happening and take a report. The 105 service covers England, Scotland and Wales only: in Northern Ireland, call NIE Networks on 03457 643 643, which is answered around the clock and charged at standard rates rather than being free. If anyone is in danger, or you can see damaged power lines, call 999 instead. This site is unofficial and reads public data after the fact: it is not a way to report a fault, and nothing you do here reaches your network operator.
The map shows reported electricity outages from all seven UK Distribution Network Operators: the companies responsible for maintaining local electricity networks and delivering power to homes and businesses. By default only unplanned outages are shown (sudden faults and emergencies); switching to All includes planned interruptions for scheduled maintenance work.
Each marker is positioned at the approximate centre of the affected area, as reported by the DNO. The figure alongside is the DNO's own estimate of customers affected. A single fault can affect anything from one property to several thousand.
The seven DNOs and their coverage areas:
Outage data is scraped from each DNO's public website or API every 5–15 minutes. Different DNOs publish in different formats and update at different speeds: some report new faults within minutes; others may lag by 15 minutes or more. The data is presented as received from the DNO and is not independently verified. For the most current information on a specific outage, always check your DNO's own website directly.
If one operator's feed stops working, an amber note appears above the map naming that operator and the area it covers, and saying when it last reported. The note matters in both directions: while a feed is down, new power cuts in that area will be missing from the map, and cuts already shown there may have been restored without the map knowing. Every other area is unaffected, and the scraper status page shows exactly what failed. The note appears once a feed is 45 minutes behind, which is the same threshold used elsewhere on the site for flagging a figure as older than it looks.
The history section shows how Britain's grid has changed over time. Four time periods are available, each with a different resolution: past day at 5-minute intervals, past week at 30-minute intervals, past year and all time at daily resolution. The archive goes back to January 2020. Click a tab to open that period; click the active tab again to close it.
Each chart covers a single metric: electricity used, generation, carbon intensity, or wholesale price. The data comes from this site's own archive, built from the same public APIs that power the live figures and updated every five minutes. Because the archive is built from API snapshots rather than a continuous feed, occasional gaps may appear if the server was restarted or an upstream source was briefly unavailable.
Daily figures are cut on UTC days, not UK days. Every clock you can read on this site is UK time, but the archive aggregates each day from midnight to midnight UTC. Through British Summer Time that window runs from 01:00 to 01:00, so a "day" in the history charts and in the notes below them takes in the last hour of the previous UK day and stops an hour short of its own. Winter dates are unaffected, because UK time is UTC then. We keep it this way deliberately: the finer readings behind old daily rows are discarded as the archive ages, so re-cutting six years of history on UK days is not something we could do consistently, and a series that changed definition partway through would be harder to trust than one that is stated plainly.
Every figure on the page comes from a publicly available API or dataset. The live grid payload is rebuilt every five minutes; the power cut layer every ten, matching the interval at which the distribution network operators are polled; and the history charts once a day, shortly after midnight UTC, when the previous day’s bucket is complete. Individual figures may be older if their source updates less frequently.
The scraper status page shows the health of the data collection pipelines. It is updated in real time and reloads automatically every 60 seconds. Four cards are shown:
If a figure on the main page looks stale or missing, the status page is the first place to check.