UK Carbon Intensity Scraper

Pulls GB electricity carbon intensity and generation mix from the National Grid ESO Carbon Intensity API. No login, no proxy, no browser.

Input

Field	Type	Notes
scope	string	national or regional. Default national.
period	string	current | today | last24h | next24h. Default today.
includeGenerationMix	boolean	Add a column per fuel. Default true.

Output

One row per half-hour settlement period (national) or per DNO region (regional): from, to, region, regionId, actual, forecast, index, plus biomass, coal, gas, hydro, imports, nuclear, other, solar, wind and lowCarbonPercent when the mix is included.

Notes

• Intensity and fuel mix live on different endpoints. /generation returns the mix with no intensity attached, so asking only for it produces a fuel breakdown with every intensity column null. This Actor calls both and joins them on the settlement period's from, leaving the mix null for a period the generation series does not cover rather than borrowing the neighbouring one.
• actual and forecast are different things and both matter. Future settlement periods have a forecast and no actual; recent ones have both and they frequently disagree by tens of gCO₂/kWh. They are kept as separate columns rather than coalesced.
• The fuel mix arrives as a list, not as fields. Turning it into one column per fuel means a fuel the API omits has to become an explicit null, or rows silently shift columns between periods.
• Zero is a real value here. Coal routinely reads 0 and North Scotland's intensity genuinely hits 0; neither is missing data.
• The forecast window has no generation mix. /generation supports past windows only, so next24h returns intensity without fuel columns and the run logs that it did. Asking the generation endpoint for a forward window answers HTTP 400.
• pt24h reaches back from the timestamp you give it. Passing "now minus 24 hours" returns the window 24 to 48 hours ago, not the last day.
• Regional scope is a current-period snapshot — the API has no regional history at this endpoint — so period is ignored there.
• There is no /generation/today; today is expressed as an explicit UTC midnight-to-now window. All timestamps are UTC.