How much electricity in UK comes from low-carbon sources?

Our electricity is not made equal and can be associated with higher or lower carbon intensity. How much of UK's electricity is produced using low-carbon sources? Has this proportion decreased or increased over time? This Shiny app will help answer these questions.

The web app and the underlying data pipeline was built using open source tools. Web app's front-end was built using Shiny, electricity composition was extracted from National Grid's Carbon Intensity API using {intensegRid} package. Data and deployment pipelines were developed using GitHub Actions: schedule.yml pulls the carbon intensity data from the API, saves it in data/daily_ci.rds file daily and pushes the changes to the repo; deploy.yml deploys the changes to the shinyapps.io server on push.

Getting started

Run locally

Using Docker (+ docker-compose)

Move into repository's root directory and run the following command:

$ docker-compose up -d dev

Point your web browser to http://localhost:8080. You can keep editing the source code: changes will be available instantly.

Once you're done, run:

$ docker-compose down