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

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

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

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

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)

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.

Last year:

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

How is that surprising?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Just a minute while I cringe at the units.

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.)

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

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

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.

> 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.

here's Australia:

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

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.

Generation might be a slight misnomer, but it's conceptually the same as pumped storage - grid capacity that can be called upon as necessary.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.