ESPENI: A method to calculate Great Britains half-hourly electrical demand from publicly available data

A method is presented to combine publicly available electrical generation and interconnector data to create a timeseries dataset that approximates Great Britains half-hourly electrical demand for its public distribution system. The method uses Elexon data for generation plants connected at the transmission level that are monitored as part of the electrical systems national balancing mechanism and combines these with estimates for embedded/distributed solar and wind generation from the system operator National Grid. The resulting timeseries data therefore has both transmission connected and embedded/distribution connected generation, which overcomes one of the limitations of solely using the Elexon data. The data are presented in a raw as well as a visually checked and cleaned form and have been parsed to provide both coordinated universal time (UTC) and localtime values in ISO 8601 compatible format, making the data significantly more interoperable with other data, and more useable by a wider group of researchers and stakeholders. The method has been developed and adapted over several years as the categories of the underlying raw data have been changed from the data providers. Publishing the method and the raw and cleaned data provides other researchers with a method and data that can be further enhanced or adapted and allows the method itself to be considered and critiqued.