About
About Trydan
Trydan - the Welsh word for electricity - is an independent dashboard for Great Britain's electricity system: what is generating right now, how clean it is, and how it got here. Built entirely on public open data, with no ads, no cookies and no sign-up.
Stations mapped
3,434
With a live feed
113
Data since
2009
All-time records
19
Who builds it
I'm Dan Jones, creator of artofinfra.com. I built Trydan on and off over a few months because the grid is the largest machine in the country and the data about it is public - it deserved a dashboard that treats that data honestly.
Trydan is independent. It is not affiliated with NESO, Elexon, any energy company or any government body - it simply reads the data they publish openly.
How the numbers are made
No single source describes the whole grid, so every headline number here is a deliberate blend. Proportions and carbon intensity come from the Carbon Intensity API (NESO and the University of Oxford). Absolute megawatts and per-interconnector flows come from Elexon BMRS - which meters the transmission grid but cannot see rooftop solar or most small wind. That embedded generation is roughly a quarter of GB capacity, so Trydan adds it back from Sheffield Solar's PV Live and NESO's embedded wind estimates. Skipping that step is the classic way dashboards under-report renewables on sunny, windy days.
Per-station "live" output is shown with its real nature attached: a notified level is a plan, not a measurement, and the settled meter reading that follows lags by about a week - the station pages label both honestly and show their age. The full contract, including every endpoint this site runs on, is documented on the developers page; the jargon is unpacked in the glossary.
The honesty rules
- A plan is never labelled a measurement. Notified output is shown as "planned", and metered actuals carry their age.
- A missing number is null, never a fake zero. When a source is down or an era was not tracked, the gap is shown as a gap.
- Coal at zero is a fact, not a bug. Great Britain's last coal station closed in September 2024; the flat line is correct.
- Modelled data says so. Regional intensity is a model, embedded generation is an estimate - both are labelled as such, never passed off as meter readings.
- Sources are credited on every page. The footer names each upstream, and the data is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Cite Trydan
Journalists and researchers are welcome to use what they find here. Cite it as "Trydan (trydan.uk), built by Dan Jones" - and for the underlying figures, credit the upstream source named in the footer. The records board tracks all-time grid records as they break, and its Atom feed is the fastest way to hear about a new one.
Questions, corrections or press: [email protected]. If a number looks wrong, I want to know.