Exporting grid intensity data

Overview

Exporting grid intensity data allows you and your code to respond to changes in grid intensity over time. It also allows developers to create dashboards and monitoring tools that visualise grid intensity data, making it easier for non-technical teams to consume.

In this tutorial, you will use the Grid Intensity CLI exporter command to start a Prometheus exporter.

Before starting

Ensure that you have the Grid Intensity CLI installed locally.

Learning goals

• How to use the Grid Intensity CLI exporter command.
• How to extract grid intensity data from the export.

In this tutorial we will be using the UK Carbon Intensity API provider integration. We will use the Grid Intensity CLI to export data for the United Kingdom.

Using the exporter command

Let's use the exporter command to start a Prometheus exporter on localhost port 8000. There is no need to be familiar with Prometheus for the purposes of this tutorial.

Running the command below will start the exporter.

grid-intensity exporter --provider CarbonIntensityOrgUK --location UK --region eu-west-1 --node worker-1

Here, we have used the following flags:

• --provider to set the UK Carbon Intensity API as our data source.
• --location to tell the exporter what country/location we want to get data for.
• --region sets the cloud/data center region in which the exporter is running.
• --node sets the node on which the exporter is running.

When the exporter command runs successfully, you will see the following message:

Using provider "CarbonIntensityOrgUK" with location "UK"
Metrics available at :8000/metrics

Now, if you visit localhost:8000/metrics in our browser we will be presented with a page full of data and stats.

Extracting the relevant data

The Prometheus exporter which we have running on localhost:8000/metrics exposes a lot of data. For our purposes, we are interested in the grid intensity data that has been returned from the UK Carbon Intensity API.

In this tutorial we'll use the curl command in our terminal to fetch this data. In reality, you would add the Prometheus exporter as a data source to a tool like Grafana.

Ensure that your Prometheus exporter is still running at localhost:8000/metrics, then run the following command in your terminal.

curl -s http://localhost:8000/metrics | grep grid

# Returns
# HELP grid_intensity_carbon_average Average carbon intensity for the electricity grid in this location.
# TYPE grid_intensity_carbon_average gauge
grid_intensity_carbon_average{location="UK",node="worker-1",provider="CarbonIntensityOrgUK",region="eu-west-1",units="gCO2e per kWh"} 201

Here we can see that the current average grid intensity data in the UK is 201.

Wrapping up

Now you know how to use the exporter command to expose grid intensity on a local server. From here you can:

• Use Docker to deploy the exporter to a Kubernetes or Nomad cluster.
• Use the Prometheus exporter as a data source for a Grafana visualisation.