Hello, and welcome.

I am Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education and Student Experience) at the University of Reading and Professor of Geography. Over the past thirty years I’ve combined teaching, research, and leadership in higher education.

My teaching has focused on energy and water resources, including fieldwork in the UK and overseas. More recently, my research with colleagues at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST) has centred on sustainable water and environmental management. I also work with national bodies such as the QAA, the Office for Students, and the Royal Geographical Society.

Beyond academia, I wrote the official biography of Don McLean and appeared as his biographer in the BBC Two Classic Albums documentary on American Pie.

This site is now mainly an archive of past teaching and research resources, though I continue to maintain a few live data visualisations of electricity generation in Great Britain.

Current Electricity Generation & Imports in Britain

Grid data by category

% of installed generating capacity currently in use

Interconnector transfers (imports/exports)

The North Sea link interconnector between England and Norway opened in 2021 and is the world’s longest subsea electricity interconnector. It has a current capacity of 1400MW. Eleclink opened in 2022, has a capacity of 1200MW and runs through the channel tunnel.

UK energy & GHG data records

Increasing renewables in electricity generation 1996-2021

The decline of British coal

Greenhouse gas emissions 1990-2022

Carbon dioxide emissions by sector

Data Sources

Current generation data, except solar, is licensed and obtained from the Balancing Mechanism Reporting System (BMRS) API feed produced by Elexon. Solar and embedded wind generation data comes from the Electricity System Operator (ESO) (a division of National Grid) feed. Current generation data is updated at 10-minute intervals; embedded generation data and detailed transfers (imports/exports) data updates every 30 minutes. Historic generation data comes from UK Gov’t Electricity Statistics.

Implementation

Electricity generation information displayed on this page has been obtained from BMRS and ESO raw data feeds and stored and organised in Google spreadsheets. A Google apps script is triggered to run every 10 (BMRS) or 30 (National Grid) minutes to refresh the data feeds and update the spreadsheets. This web page uses JavaScript to retrieve data from the spreadsheets and the Google Charts library to produce the charts shown.