USA: an overview of the US electricity grid

Generation mix

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Generation by source, ranked highest to lowest.

Generation mix over the last 24 hours

Fossil (gas, coal, oil), renewable (wind, solar, hydro) and nuclear/other, from the EIA's per-fuel-type feed.

History

Choose a time range to see demand, generation and total interchange over time. Wholesale price and emissions aren't published by the EIA, so those two panels show "not available" rather than a chart.

About the US grid

Unlike Great Britain or Ireland's single all-island system, the US mainland is split into three asynchronous interconnections that don't share a common frequency reference: the Eastern Interconnection (most of the country east of the Rockies), the Western Interconnection (the Pacific states, the Rockies and the desert Southwest), and ERCOT, which covers most of Texas and deliberately stays outside the other two - and largely outside federal FERC jurisdiction - specifically to avoid being classified as interstate commerce.

Within those three, day-to-day balancing is handled by around 66 separate balancing authorities, ranging from huge regional grid operators like PJM (spanning 13 states and DC) and MISO, to Independent System Operators like CAISO, ERCOT, NYISO and ISO-NE that also run competitive wholesale markets, down to small municipal and cooperative utilities that balance their own patch directly. There's no single "US demand" figure the way there's a single GB or Ireland one - EIA's Hourly Electric Grid Monitor is the closest thing, summing the lower-48 states' balancing authorities together.

Demand, generation, total interchange and the generation mix above and below are all live from the EIA's own API - the closest thing to a single "USA" figure. Wholesale price and emissions genuinely aren't published anywhere for the lower-48 aggregate, which is why those two are shown as not available rather than a number from a different, incompatible source - see data sources below.

Context

Figures are approximate, gathered from public EIA reporting rather than a live feed. Last checked: 23 August 2026.

Data sources for USA

The Elexon Insights Solution, NESO Data Portal and Carbon Intensity API that power the Great Britain pages are UK-specific and don't cover the US at all - and unlike GB or Ireland, there's no single US operator to point a live feed at either. This page uses one source only: the US Energy Information Administration's own free API, specifically its Hourly Electric Grid Monitor (EIA-930), which powers demand, generation, total interchange and the generation mix (including the 24-hour stack and this page's History section) above and below.

Why it's limited, and why this page deliberately sticks to that one source rather than stitching several together:

• About a day behind, not real-time. EIA-930 is built from roughly 66 individual balancing authorities' own hourly submissions, which get revised over the following days as authorities correct earlier figures - EIA itself flags this data as preliminary. There's no faster "official" version of the same lower-48 total to fall back to instead.
• Lower-48 states only. Alaska, Hawaii and US territories run their own separate, non-interconnected grids outside EIA-930's balancing-authority coverage, so none of them are reflected in any figure on this page.
• No wholesale price. Unlike ENTSO-E's day-ahead price feed for the European pages on this site, EIA-930 doesn't publish price data at all. Rather than show a number from an unrelated, incompatible source, the price stat and its History panel are marked "not available".
• No emissions figure. EIA doesn't publish a carbon-intensity number either, live or historical, so emissions is also marked "not available" rather than estimated.

Faster, more granular USA data does exist - gridstatus.io normalises near-real-time feeds from CAISO, ERCOT, PJM, MISO, SPP, NYISO and ISO-NE, and each of those ISOs also publishes its own feed directly. This page deliberately doesn't use them: they each cover a specific region rather than a national figure, which would mean showing seven-plus separate numbers instead of the single lower-48 total EIA already provides in one call. See the sitewide data sources page for how this compares to the GB and Ireland pages.