GB Network Map
Details
In plain English: keeping supply and demand matched costs money, and it is not all spent the same way. Some is spent through the balancing mechanism, which this site already shows. The rest is bought under contract, off-market, and that is what this is. Comparing the price NESO paid against the market price of the same electricity shows what availability is worth on a given day — some days it is close to the market, and a tight evening can run well above it.
| Day | Bought | Price | Cost |
|---|
Capacity from the Elexon BM Unit registry; output from physical notifications. A negative figure means units are pumping — drawing from the grid to store energy.
Accepted bids and offers from the last hour (Elexon BOALF). An offer turns a unit up, a bid turns it down. “SO” marks acceptances taken for a system reason such as a transmission constraint rather than for energy balance.
In plain English: the electricity itself is the small part of your bill. Everything else — the wires, the meter, the policy levies, VAT and the supplier's margin — is the rest, and this shows the split. It also shows that the same tariff costs different amounts in different parts of the country, because network charges are regional.
| Region | p/kWh | Standing charge | vs cheapest |
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NESO's published half-hourly forecast for distribution-connected (embedded) solar and wind — the generation FUELINST cannot see. Not modelled here.
NESO's own 14-day-ahead national wind forecast, averaged per day. Not modelled here.
What this does: pick something you want to run, and this works out what it costs to start it now versus starting it at the cheapest point in the next day — using the actual half-hourly prices published for your region, not an estimate.
Prices are Octopus Agile including VAT and are unit rates only; a standing charge applies whether you run the appliance or not, so it makes no difference to the comparison. Carbon uses the live national intensity, which will differ by the time a deferred run actually happens.
NESO's published carbon forecast against the settled outturn for the same half-hour. Bias says which way it errs; mean absolute error says by how much.
Generator outages published under REMIT, the regime obliging operators to declare unavailable plant. Largest capacity loss first.
In plain English: the big power stations connect to the transmission grid, and everyone can see them. This is everything else — the solar farm on a local substation, the battery on an 11 kV spur — plus the thing no live feed shows: what has been accepted to connect but has not been built yet. An accepted application is not a promise, and some will lapse.
| Technology | Connected | Queued | Pipeline |
|---|
In plain English: most of Britain's wind farms are in Scotland, but most of the electricity is used in England. The power lines between the two can only carry so much. On a windy day the Scottish turbines can make more power than those lines can move south.
When that happens, the National Energy System Operator pays wind farms to stop generating — that is "curtailment" — and then pays gas plants further south to start up instead, to make up the shortfall. Both payments show up on your bill, and the wind that was switched off is clean electricity nobody got to use.
So the figures below are: what those instructions cost, and how much wind energy was thrown away.
This is why the grid is being reinforced with new north–south links. Costs are what NESO paid generators to change output; they are one part of the network charges in a domestic bill, not the whole bill.
This is the cause of the costs above. The grid is divided into zones, and only so much power can cross the lines between them. Each row is one of those crossing points — a "boundary" — showing how much power wants to cross versus how much the wires can actually carry.
When a bar hits 100%, the plan doesn't fit. Generators on the busy side get paid to switch off and generators on the other side get paid to switch on. That payment is the constraint cost. So a boundary sitting at or over its limit today is a fair predictor of a curtailment bill tomorrow.
Codes are NESO's own boundary names, shown as published. Each row is that boundary at its busiest half-hour in the published window, so it shows the worst moment, not an average.
| Cable | Now | Mean | Peak import | Peak export |
|---|
The only per-site usage on this page. Firm capacity is the load a site can carry with its largest transformer out of service, so a substation above 100% is not impossible — it is the interesting case.
The only measured voltage on this page — every other voltage shown is a nominal design rating from an asset register, which says how the equipment was specified rather than what it is doing. Judged against the statutory ±6% in the Electricity Safety, Quality and Continuity Regulations 2002.
| Tariff | Ex VAT | Inc VAT | vs wholesale |
|---|
What the market has planned for each interconnector — the only forward view of the cables here. Elexon publishes no schedule, because a cable's flow is set by day-ahead market coupling rather than declared by a unit; ENTSO-E publishes the coupling result.
| To | Via | Import | Export | Net |
|---|
Live generation in every grid GB has a cable to. Bidding zones, not countries: Denmark splits at the Great Belt and only DK1 reaches us, and North Sea Link lands in Norway's NO2.
Every grid Britain has an interconnector to, dirtiest first — so an import can be read against what it carries. Monthly averages from Ember, published about two months in arrears; each figure states its own month. These are not live readings.
What exists, as opposed to what happens to be running. Ember republishes each technology on its own schedule, so entries can differ in vintage and each carries the month it describes.
In plain English: NESO has to publish certain notices to everyone trading electricity. Most are routine — a trade with a neighbouring grid, an outage of its own IT. The reason to show an ordinary fortnight is so that an extraordinary one reads as extraordinary.
Aggregated from snapshots this instance has stored. History starts when the server first ran, so a fresh install has little to show yet.
| Feed | Uptime | Live | Stale | Unavailable | Samples |
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