Getting Started - Open Electricity Documentation

This guide walks through fetching a day of power generation data from Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM), grouped by fuel technology, and displaying it as a table. By the end you’ll have a working script in either Python or TypeScript.

Prerequisites

You’ll need an API key from the Open Electricity Platform. See SDK configuration for how to set it up as an environment variable.

Install the SDK

uv add openelectricity

Both SDKs read your OPENELECTRICITY_API_KEY environment variable automatically — no need to pass credentials in code.

Initialise the client

The client handles authentication, request retries and response parsing. See the SDK overview for more detail.

Python

from openelectricity import OEClient

client = OEClient()

TypeScript

import { OpenElectricityClient } from "openelectricity"

const client = new OpenElectricityClient()

Build the date range

We’ll query yesterday’s full 24-hour window so the data is complete.

Python

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

yesterday = (datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1)).replace(
    hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0
)
today = yesterday + timedelta(days=1)

TypeScript

const yesterday = new Date()
yesterday.setDate(yesterday.getDate() - 1)
yesterday.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0)

const today = new Date(yesterday)
today.setDate(today.getDate() + 1)

const fmt = (d: Date) =>
  `${d.getFullYear()}-${String(d.getMonth() + 1).padStart(2, "0")}-${String(d.getDate()).padStart(2, "0")}T00:00:00`

Using yesterday ensures you always get a full day of settled data. Today’s data may still be arriving.

Request power data

Call get_network_data / getNetworkData with these parameters:

network_code="NEM" — the National Electricity Market covering eastern Australia

metrics=[DataMetric.POWER] — instantaneous generation in MW. See the power guide

interval="1h" — hourly aggregation

secondary_grouping="fueltech_group" — break results down by fuel technology group (solar, wind, coal, etc.)

Python

from openelectricity.types import DataMetric

with OEClient() as client:
    response = client.get_network_data(
        network_code="NEM",
        metrics=[DataMetric.POWER],
        interval="1h",
        date_start=yesterday,
        date_end=today,
        secondary_grouping="fueltech_group",
    )

TypeScript

const { datatable } = await client.getNetworkData("NEM", ["power"], {
  interval: "1h",
  dateStart: fmt(yesterday),
  dateEnd: fmt(today),
  secondaryGrouping: ["fueltech_group"],
})

Understand the response

The API returns time series data grouped by your requested dimensions. Each series contains:

FieldDescriptionmetricThe metric name (power)unitUnit of measurement (MW)resultsArray of named series, one per fuel technology group

Each result has a data array of { timestamp, value } pairs at the requested interval.

Display as a table

Python

# Option 1: Polars DataFrame
df = response.to_polars()
print(df)

# Option 2: Console-friendly records
for record in response.to_records():
    print(record)

TypeScript

console.table(datatable.toConsole())

Complete example

Runnable end-to-end scripts you can copy and execute directly.

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from openelectricity import OEClient
from openelectricity.types import DataMetric

yesterday = (datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1)).replace(
    hour=0, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0
)
today = yesterday + timedelta(days=1)

with OEClient() as client:
    response = client.get_network_data(
        network_code="NEM",
        metrics=[DataMetric.POWER],
        interval="1h",
        date_start=yesterday,
        date_end=today,
        secondary_grouping="fueltech_group",
    )
    df = response.to_polars()
    print(df)