A method to calculate Great Britains half-hourly electrical demand from publicly available data
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Publicly available electrical generation and interconnector data is combined to create a half-hourly dataset for Great Britains electrical demand. The method uses Elexon data for power plants connected at the transmission level, monitored as part of the balancing mechanism, and combines these with the estimates for embedded generation for solar and wind generation from the system operator National Grid. The resulting dataset therefore has both transmission connected and distribution connected generation. Finally, to arrive at a closer representation of Great Britains demand rather than its generation, the net imports are calculated from summing the values of all imports and exports. The resulting dataset termed ESPENI (Elexon Sum Plus Embedded Net Imports) keeps within 11 per cent of the official quarterly values from BEIS, which include autogeneration that is not publicly available. The datasets are presented in both a cleaned and raw form and have been parsed to provide UTC and localtime columns to be more easily utilised by a wider group of researchers.
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