The power desk · Europe’s grid, read live
What the grid is burning.
Right now.
Pick a country and the desk draws its last 48 hours of electricity — every fuel a band of the same stacked area, lignite to solar, at the resolution the source publishes: quarter-hours for the big grids, whole hours for a few small ones. The current mix sits under it as a bar with percentages. The numbers are Fraunhofer ISE’s Energy-Charts, the reference record of European power, fetched through this page’s own five-minute relay.
Beside it, Great Britain’s carbon intensity — the gCO₂ behind each kWh — drawn as a board of fourteen regions straight off NESO’s open API, with the national figure and the next 24 hours of its forecast. No key, no account. The page remembers your country, and a link carries it.
15 countries · 10 fuel inks · 48 hours drawn · 14 UK regions · two named authorities · refreshed every 5 minutes
The mix
Every fuel. Two days deep.
The stacked area is the country’s whole public generation, fuel by fuel; the bar below it is the same picture at the latest interval the source has filled, as percentages. The desk refreshes itself every five minutes — the same rhythm as its relay’s cache — and says when it last read the wire.
Generation
waiting for the wire
Not read yet.
The carbon map
The gCO₂ behind the kilowatt-hour.
Fourteen tiles, one per region of the British grid, each coloured by the API’s own intensity band and carrying its forecast in gCO₂/kWh. The tiles sit roughly where their regions do — a drawn board, not a survey map. Above them, the national figure and the shape of the next 24 hours.
Carbon intensity · GB
waiting for the wire
Not read yet.
About
Two authorities, named.
The generation mix is Energy-Charts, the public record kept by Fraunhofer ISE in Freiburg — the same numbers Europe’s energy press quotes. Its API answers only its own website, so this page keeps a thin relay on its own origin: one hardcoded upstream, one whitelisted country parameter, and a five-minute cache. The cache is a courtesy, not a shortcut — the upstream rate-limits after roughly eight rapid calls, and five minutes against a quarter-hourly series costs nothing anyone could see.
The carbon map is the Carbon Intensity API published by NESO, the National Energy System Operator for Great Britain, built with the University of Oxford — read here directly, no key and no relay, because NESO answers any origin. The regional numbers are NESO’s forecasts: the API publishes no regional measurements, and the board says so rather than dressing a forecast as a reading. The national figure shows the measured value whenever the API has one.
What the feeds do not say, the desk does not invent. Generation series trail the clock by a quarter-hour or more and the last points are often still empty — the desk reads the latest filled one and stamps it. The fuel inks are fixed in both editions, because lignite is lignite on any ground. Your chosen country is remembered in this browser and nowhere else.