From numbers to knowledge: how to use the electricity industry new data platform

• How is the electricity data app made?

• How do I access electricity data?

• What energy data is included in the platform?

• Who can use the EU electricity data app?

• How to decode electricity data across countries fuels and timeframes

• What is the difference between electricity capacity and generation?

• A work in progress 

Have you ever wondered how many carbon emissions is your country producing right now? Do you need to compare this year’s average electricity price in the EU to the past year? Paraphs you are just curious to know what the demand for electricity in Europe is or how much of the electricity generated in comes from fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear energy sources. Either way, we’ve got you covered.

Eurelectric has released ELDA, a state-of-the-art free electricity data application that gives access to key parameters of Europe’s power sector. This first-of-its-kind platform synthesises the scraped data into intuitive, easy-to-read graphics that describe the power sector. The tool seeks to improve communication and raise public awareness over the sector’s energy transition with a clear, transparent and accurate data platform.

 

In our Secretary General Kristian Ruby own words: “With Elda we hope to stimulate an informed and fact-based discussion about the European energy transition. Elda is set to change the game on how we communicate about the energy transition at Eurelectric and beyond. Everyone, from policymakers to analysts, journalists, researchers and students can now track where their own country stands with the energy transition, compare their performance with other countries, and across different timeframes.”

Don’t worry it’s easy to understand and even easier to use, so use to question the very need for a how-to guide, but let’s explore how to make the best use of this new electric application, but first a word on how ELDA came to be.

How is the electricity data app made?

ELDA, short for electricity data, originates from several data sources. The app was made with an in-house data aggregation program developed in partnership with Enerdata and compiled from the ENTSO-E transparency platform, Eurostat, official EU statistics, and verified data from the UK.

Its multi-source nature ensures the quality and accuracy of the data is greatly improved. Drawing on a database with over 17 million data points per year, Elda is updated daily with the latest trends from the sector.

How do I access electricity data?

You can always access our electricity data platform by clicking here or typing electricity-data.eurelectric.org in your search browser. Beyond its user-friendly design, what makes Elda unique is the possibility to download every number either as raw data listed in an Excel spreadsheet or as a nicely designed graph, ready for use in the PowerPoint presentation, report, academic research or news article.

Here is a quick video explainer for you.

What energy data is included in the platform?

Here comes the good part. The application includes the latest figures on:

• electricity generation demand,
• power prices,
• capacity,
• CO2 emissions,
• cross-border flows.

You can then augment the data by selecting the timeframe, fuel type and geography of interest in the tab at the top of the page. To select a different country or region, use the "Geography" tab.  Adjust the "Period" tab to get the desired granularity of the data. At the top right corner of the charts, depending on the chart type, you may find options to modify the date range, export chart data, or download the chart.

Who can use the EU electricity data app?

That’s the question we like the most, everybody, be it a utility, data centre, market trader, large company, or a university professor, researcher or journalist, all customers are welcomed to interact with ELDA for free.  

How to decode electricity data across countries fuels and timeframes

Enough with instructions, let’s look at a few examples.

Electricity Generation

Under this first category, you can see all of the data on electricity generation in the EU. First, when sorting by fuel type you will see a 2023 year to date pie chart that shows the share of renewables, fossil fuels and nuclear in the energy mix, which today, sits at 982 terawatt hours for renewables, 44% of the energy mix, 731 terawatt-hours for fossil fuels, 33% of the energy mix and 517 terawatt-hours for nuclear, 23% of the energy mix.

If you switch to sorting by total, you will also see this year’s total generation stacked up against previous years. You can then further sort by timescale – be it monthly, daily, or hourly – to see how much total generation takes place over the course of those periods in the EU.

If you are sorting by fuel, you can get even more generation insights on specific sources of electricity. As seen in the next graph below,  you can even select the hourly option to see the output of every source at different hours of the day, beyond the monthly and yearly averages. Moving from a synchronistic to a diachronist approach, you can also access the historical energy output of a certain country or the EU by comparing several annual output against the year-to-date level. 

The graph below shows how much electricity is generated by each source on an annual basis. You can shift between different years in this view, but if you sort by monthly, daily, or hourly, you can see the output of each electricity source over the past months, days, or even hours and how they compare to each other. 

Carbon emissions

Much like the generation category, the CO2eq (CO2 equivalent) emissions category shows the share of different fuels in the YTD total emissions of the power sector.  

Today as always, coal contributes the most with 52% of emissions or 250 MtCO2eq (megatons of CO2 equivalent). Meanwhile, natural gas comes in second with 27% of emissions (131 MtCO2eq) while other fossil fuels such as oil, non-renewable waste and manufactured and shale gas come in third with 21% (98 MtCO2eq) of emissions. This data can also be sorted yearly, monthly (Figure 2.1.2), daily or hourly to see how the makeup of historical emissions has progressed, and how each source has compared to each other at those intervals. 

Also like the generation category, the emissions category has a breakdown of total power sector emissions year after – which can also be sorted to see the past months, days, and hours – but also shows the projection for 2030. 

Beyond this, the carbon emissions category can also be sorted by intensity, which provides a breakdown of the grams of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per kilowatt-hour generated (g-CO2e/kWh). In the graph below you can see the progression from 1990 to today with a decrease from 500 g-CO2e/kWh to 215 g-CO2e/kWh. Sorting by period also shows you how emissions intensity has evolved over other time periods – in this case, daily. 

Electricity demand 

Moving from energy production to energy consumption, the electricity demand category breaks down Europe’s electricity demand today, versus in 2030 and can also be sorted across the various time periods as in the other categories. Interesting to note is that overall electricity demand is expected to increase from now until 2030, from 2,797 TWh in 2022 to 3,551 TWh in 2030. 

As shown in the linear visualisation below, we can observe a decrease in power demand from 2021 to 2022, most likely attributable to three factors:

1. The high gas and electricity prices triggered by Russia’s gas crunch
2. The EU energy savings incentives and emergency measures adopted last year to address the energy crisis.
3. Industrial curtailment of energy intensives as a result of skyrocketing energy prices

 Speaking of prices, the next section zooms in market data.

Electricity prices

Elda covers the daily, annual and annual average day-ahead wholesale price of electricity. The average annual day-ahead prices for prior years, below, show the drastic increase during last year’s energy crisis when prices reached an average of €227.11 per megawatt hour, compared to the rather normal averages of 2018, 2019, and 2020 of €30-50 per megawatt hour.

Meanwhile, the figure below shows the maximum, minimum and average daily day-ahead prices over the past month of trading days. Each day in the graph includes the minimum, maximum and average value. When when sorting by period, you can get more granular data on the day-ahead price development over that period.

Capacity

Before going into more detail with this key section, let’s clarify what capacity actually means.

What is the difference between electricity capacity and generation?

Capacity, unlike generation, is the total amount of electricity that could possibly be generated if a generation asset was running at, naturally, “full capacity’. As shown in the first bar chart below, this category visualises the year to date cumulative installed capacity of each energy source, including coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, bioenergy, hydropower, solar, wind onshore, wind offshore, other renewables and other fossil fuels.

The second bar chart stacks the different generation sources on top of each other for an annual breakdown as far back as 2018.

Cross-border flows 

Finally, cross-border flows, provides an extremely useful look at the electricity flow between countries. Below you can see the net export position of the EU as a whole on a yearly basis, with the possibility to select more granular timeframes. For example, to this day the EU has a net import position of 5,491 GWh of electricity.

Taking this a step further, sorting by neighbour allows you to see the net export position over a selected timeframe with any neighbouring country your reference country is trading with. Since we are looking at the EU as the reference, this graph shows the net trading position of the entire EU with the neighbouring country, which happens to be the United Kingdom in this case, on an yearly basis.

Going from the European to the national level, ELDA also shows the EU countries’ net-cross-border flows in the current year versus previous years. Can you guess the first power exporter in the EU? How about the country that imports most energy?

Elda also accounts for cross-border flows that are not within the EU. In this final bar chart you can see the 2023 year to date trade flows of electricity with non-EU countries. 

A work in progress 

Elda is in her naissance and as with any new tool, there are bound to be possible improvements. That’s why we are asking you to flag any extra features we could add, improvements we could make, or issues with the interface we have not yet caught.

Meanwhile, our team will continue to work on and improve the platform to ensure Elda grows into the game-changing energy transition data tool she was born to be.   

For more information don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.