Balancing / accepted actions
How the grid makes a half-hour work.
Generators, batteries and flexible demand submit prices for moving up or down. NESO accepts the actions it needs to keep supply and demand matched.
Read the movement
Up means more export or less consumption. Down means less export or more consumption. These are instructions, not energy volumes.
The latest acceptance window
Adjacent rows belonging to the same acceptance are combined into a single movement. The feed refreshes every five minutes.
Accepted instructions
…
Unique BM Unit + acceptance pairs
Moving up
…
Net instructed change
Moving down
…
Net instructed change
Settlement period
—
Waiting for feed
Joining accepted actions to the asset register…
The live actions and human-readable asset details arrive from separate Elexon feeds.
Why an accepted action can look odd
The Balancing Mechanism is dispatch data, not a tidy leaderboard.
One instruction can have several legs
A unit may ramp through multiple time-stamped levels. The table collapses those legs into the start and end level.
A battery can move in either direction
Charging is usually a downward action; discharging is usually upward. Its registered unit name is used to identify it.
MW is not MWh
The displayed move is a change in operating level. Energy delivered also depends on how long the instruction lasts.
Source
Direct links to the live instructions and the reference data used to translate them.