The leading electricity grid API

Frequently asked questions

What is Electricity Maps offering?

We offer hourly carbon electricity consumption and production data for over 50+ countries globally (and 200+ regions). Our data includes the carbon intensity as well as the power breakdown outlining power sources and imports/exports between countries and regions.
The data is available in three-time frames: historically, in real-time, and as forecasted for the next 24 hours.

Is Electricity Maps offering marginal or average emissions data?

We provide historical, real-time and forecasted flow-traced (and average) grid emissions data. In addition, we offer historical marginal emissions data. Learn more about the practicalities of using marginal emissions factors here.

Which regions do you cover?

We have good coverage in Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, and parts of Asia. Our ultimate goal is to cover every country in the world and we are constantly adding new countries to our map. For some countries, we have not yet identified data sources that meet our requirements. If you are aware of any data sources which can help us add a new country to our map, please let us know in our Github Repository. Our free app can help you identify what countries we already cover. If your country is not on the map, please leave us a message through the contact form as we might have limited data for it or will add it to our product roadmap.

Can I use Electricity Maps data for my scope 2 carbon accounting?

You can access our API to get 24/7 electricity data for carbon footprint reports catered to business customers or your internal organization. We provide high-quality and scientifically-backed data, compliant with the GHG Protocol Scope 2 requirements on disclosing location-based emissions. Learn more here.

Can Electricity Maps data be used for industrial load shifting?

Our real-time and forecasted carbon intensity signal enables strategic scheduling of energy-intensive activities for times when electricity comes from cleaner sources. You can utilize our data to boost your decarbonization strategies, leading to significant emissions savings, e.g. by enabling carbon-aware computing in data centers. Learn more here.

How can I access your data?

Our data is accessible in multiple ways, see Get our data for more details. If you want to learn more about how to use the API, you can visit our API documentation.

Can I trial your data before subscribing?

Yes, we offer a free trial, and you can get request access here! The free trial lasts one month from the date of subscription. You can access the carbon intensity and power-breakdown data for more than 160 zones worldwide on different time frames: 24h historical (we offer data reaching back 2-8 years in our commercial offering), real-time, and forecasted data.

How much does your API cost?

You can access our API with a monthly subscription of 500€/zone/month. Besides our zonal offering, we also offer discounts for regional or worldwide bundles including additional premium services. If you are interested in exploring these please reach out to us and we are happy to discuss these with you and tailor a solution specifically for you.

Can I use Electricity Maps for a personal or research project?

Next to our commercial API, we offer a free API that allows you to access a restricted amount of data for free. After the registration, you will be able to access real-time data for many countries globally and use the data for your personal and non-commercial projects. You can also explore our real-time and historical data in our free app located here. To support public research and academia we provide part of our historical data for free, as well as significant discounts for additional data coverage. For further information and access to the data please visit our academia page.

How is your data used?

Our data has been integrated across 40+ customers operating in different industries. The data allows you to measure your carbon footprint from electricity consumption, take actionable steps towards reduction, as well as create new product offerings that empower your customers to do the same. Today our data is used to reduce the carbon footprint of data centres, schedule energy-intensive software updates at lower-carbon times, optimize EV charging, empower users of smart home solutions, create new tools to help users quantify their carbon footprint, and much more.

Do you have an example of how your data is used?

You can explore an outline of how some of our customers use our data in our collection of use cases here. If you are a customer wanting to write a use case together, please let us know as we are always happy to showcase the amazing solutions our customers create with our data.

How can you help me implement your data?

Even though we do not provide any tools or services to implement our carbon emissions data, we are available for support within different stages of your project. Please send us a message through our contact form to better describe your project and we will make sure to support you in the best way possible!

Where do you get your data from?

We retrieve raw data from a variety of public data sources, typically transmission system operators, balancing entities or market operators, which are listed here. Our system then standardizes and aggregates the data to account for imports and exports of power between countries and uses this data to train our multiple machine learning models that allow us to offer you the wide range of data points currently available.

What does your methodology include?

Our methodology includes different calculations among which the tracking of imports and exports with a peer-reviewed flow-tracing methodology, the calculation of forecasted data for the next 24 hours, and the estimation of missing data. Some part of our methodology is available open-source on our GitHub Wiki and further information can be found on our blog.

How do you calculate carbon intensity?

The carbon intensity is calculated by multiplying the power consumption from each source by the corresponding emission factors. The emissions factors depend on different parameters such as the production source, the region and many others. Our data is calculated with a number of regional and global emission factors, which can be viewed here. To support you in your scope 2 and scope 3 calculations, we offer LCA as well as operational emission calculations.

What is the time granularity of your data?

Our real-time data is updated every hour (typically with one hour delay). We align temporal granularity across all zones in order to account for imports and exports between zones. Our forecasts are also updated every hour and have a time horizon of 24 hours.

What does it mean that you are open-source?

An important part of Electricity Maps is our large community of contributors and we are proud to be the most followed climate change project worldwide on GitHub. Through more than 1,300 contributions on Github and over 3,000 members in Electricity Maps public Slack channels, we ensure to actively engage with our community to increase our coverage and always ensure the highest levels of accuracy. All contributions are reviewed and accepted by Electricity Maps team before being integrated.

Can I contribute to your repository?

Yes, we are always happy to hear that people are interested in supporting our mission. Join a network of hundreds of contributors on our GitHub Repository In our GitHub Wiki you will find an outline of how to contribute and useful tips for starting your journey as a contributor.

What is Electricity Maps position on energy policies? What technologies does Electricity Maps support? Is Electricity Maps taking a position on different aspects (e.g. nuclear)?

Electricity Maps does not take any positions on the energy policies or the technologies that must be used to decarbonize the electricity grid. Our mission is to provide individuals and companies with the most granular and accurate data possible to drive the electricity grid's decarbonization. Scientific integrity is one of our core values which drives us in our everyday work.

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