National Grid: Live Status

Just past midnight on 18^th March, Danish wind turbines produced enough electricity to power the entire country. We knew about this as it happened because Energinet, the operators of the Danish electricity grid, have a live display on their website.

Unfortunately the only real-time data on the British National Grid's website are graphs of total demand and supply frequency. More information is available through the Balancing Mechanism Reporting System, but it isn't presented very well. They do however provide data feeds, and so began my latest project.

Two weekends later, and my National Grid: Live Status website has been unleashed, displaying the current production breakdown (updated every five minutes) and historical data. Every time it's windy I now check to see just how much energy is being produced – as I was creating the site, British wind turbines hit a new record of 5.3GW.