Great Britain electricity price today

This page covers the Great Britain market: England, Scotland and Wales, balanced as a single zone. Our numbers come from Elexon, the company that administers settlement and publishes the BMRS data service. Generation is the FUELINST dataset, refreshed every five minutes. It reports only transmission-connected output, so rooftop and farm-scale solar and much of the smaller wind on distribution networks never appear. For that reason we publish no solar figure for Britain, and the wind line understates what the weather is really producing. Read the renewable share as a share of metered transmission output, not of national demand.

Two half-hourly prices are shown. The imbalance price is what parties pay or receive for being out of balance; since late 2015 there has been one price for both directions. The real-time price is the market index price from the APXMIDP provider, a traded-price signal for the same period. The two can diverge widely, because one reflects the system operator’s balancing actions and the other reflects trading. Prices are in pounds sterling; a dollar figure is a derived conversion and says so.

What moves the picture: wind output, gas as the usual marginal fuel, steady nuclear, and flows over interconnectors, including Viking Link to Denmark. Clock changes matter too. A normal settlement day has 48 periods, rising to 50 when the clocks go back in October, and every period is converted to UTC before we store it. Values are provisional and can be revised later.