At 
GMT
Serving
of GB demand
Modelled using
live sites
Installed GB capacity: GWp
(excludes solar BMUs: GWp)
All time peak generation: GW
Also see our API site capacity page.
Real-time data from NESO showing the generation mix and forecasted demand for the GB transmission network. Data is downloaded via the Elexon Insights API. Demand (negative values) are not shown here - these are replaced with 0. Solar BMUs appear within the 'Other' category.
Show:
About the demand data...
Most solar PV connected to the GB electricity network does not supply metering to NESO, and so NESO sees most solar PV generation as a suppression of demand. This means that the observed/metered 'National Demand’ outturn reported by NESO and Elexon is not a true representation of how much electricity was consumed across the network. When modelling demand, NESO also consider so-called 'Virtual Demand', which is the metered 'National Demand' plus NESO's own estimates of the generation from "unmetered" [by NESO] Solar and Wind generators. When forecasting demand it is often easier to forecast 'Virtual demand', which is predominantly behaviour-driven, and then to subtract a forecast of the unmetered solar and wind to create a forecast of the ‘National Demand’.
Here we present both the 'National Demand', as well as the 'Virtual Demand' which is calculated as the 'Demand outturn' plus the non-BMU solar PV.
(N.B. We do NOT currently add NESO's estimate of unmetered wind generation in our calculation of 'Virtual Demand', but this is something we're working on including.)
Use the form below to download historic results. You can download a maximum of 12 months at a time. The earliest data available at the moment is '2013-01-01'. For a description of the column headers please read the API documentation.
We update this estimate every 30 minutes during daylight hours. The results on this page will automatically refresh every 300 seconds. You can pause the automatic updates or manually update the data using the "Refresh:" buttons further up.
PV_Live
by Sheffield
Solar is licensed under CC BY 4.0
