Query Great Britain's historic generation mix and demand datasets from the NESO Data Portal's CKAN API
domain: neso.energy · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
No auth is required for read access; call the CKAN action API at api.neso.energy/api/3/action/.
Use package_search?q= to find datasets (e.g. 'Historic generation mix and carbon intensity', 'Embedded Wind and Solar Forecasts') and resource_show?id= to get a resource's ID and metadata.
Query tabular data with datastore_search?resource_id=...&filters={...}, or run SQL joins/filters via datastore_search_sql?sql=....
Remember CKAN terminology: a 'Package' is a Dataset and a 'Resource' is a Data File in the portal UI.
Check resource_show's modification-date metadata before re-querying, rather than polling datastore_search on a tight loop.
Known gotchas
Hard rate limits are enforced: 1 request/second on the general CKAN API and just 2 requests/minute on the Datastore API — NESO states it will block IPs that exceed these.
Resource IDs must be copied from each dataset's page (via its API/cURL integration snippet) — they're not derivable from dataset names.
This is distinct from the separate UK Carbon Intensity API (api.carbonintensity.org.uk) — don't conflate the two GB data sources.
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