about

A live, plain-English answer to whether electricity is cheap right now in the UK.

what the answer means

Most UK households pay a fixed unit rate, so "is electricity cheap?" can't be answered honestly in pence per kilowatt-hour — your bill is the same at 3am or 6pm. The honest signal for everyone is carbon intensity: how much CO₂ each kilowatt-hour generates right now. When wind and solar are doing the work, the grid is greener and (over time) wholesale prices push fixed rates down. So we say "yes, it's cheap" when carbon intensity is in the low band — a good time to put the dishwasher on or charge the EV.

If you're on Octopus Agile, your half-hourly price tracks the same wholesale market. You can opt in via the toggle on the home page to see your actual p/kWh inline.

methodology

Live carbon intensity from the Carbon Intensity API — published every half-hour by the National Energy System Operator with EDF, the University of Oxford and WWF.
State derivation maps the API's index field directly: very low / low → YES, moderate → SORT OF, high / very high → NO. We don't compute our own band — the API's national distribution is more authoritative.
Regional answers use the API's outward-postcode endpoint (e.g. SW1A, M1). Region detection on the home page uses Vercel edge geo headers; you can override via the "change" link.
Action chips ("good time for dishwasher / EV / dryer") scan the next 48 hours of forecast for a contiguous window of the appropriate duration where the majority of half-hours classify as low or very low.

data sources & attribution

Carbon Intensity API — National Energy System Operator, EDF, University of Oxford, WWF (CC BY 4.0).
Octopus Energy — Agile tariff rates (free public API).
postcodes.io — UK postcode → outcode reverse geocoding.

JSON API

The same data the page renders is available as JSON. Free, CORS-enabled, cached at the edge:

GET https://ispowercheap.co.uk/api/now
GET https://ispowercheap.co.uk/api/now?postcode=SW1A

Please attribute as above when you build on top of it.

privacy

No accounts, no tracking, no analytics, no cookie banner. Region detection uses the IP-derived header Vercel adds at the edge — never stored. If you opt in to the postcode lookup via your browser, your latitude/longitude is truncated to ~110 m before being sent to postcodes.io.