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Unit Starts

About

The Unit Starts chart replicates the Unit Bid/Offer Prices chart, but plotting levels of starts for a given unit or filter group. For instance, the following chart shows the evolving levels of run hours at coal-fired power stations in the market over time:

Included Data

The starts are counted based upon each half-hour period in which the balancing adjusted generation (levels of post-balancing generation after National Grid has adjusted generation within gate closure) is positive in a half hour period, but zero or negative in the period before.

This indicates how often units are coming on and off, but it should be noted that these values are calculated from half-hourly not by minute data so fast units such as pumped storage units may have more starts than those indicated.

Data Service

The Unit Starts data can be extracted from the API to extract on a monthly basis the starts for a given unit. The parameters used as follows:

Code Required/Optional Description
chart Required unitsstarts
filter Optional The group to show data for, e.g. filter=fuel&fuel=coal. This defaults to no filter and is as in the browser URL when picking options in the chart normally.
bmunitid Optional The is the unit id and can be found in the Browser URL. For instance bmunitid=T_ABTH7.
format Required The type of format. The value could be xml or csv . (See 'formats' action)

Examples :

https://enbm.netareports.com/dataService?username=xxx&password=xxx&format=xml&action=data&chart=unitsstarts&filter=fuel&fuel=all&bmunitid=T_ABTH7&accdecl=0