GridTradingDesk
Illustrative prices for flavour — not live market data. See real GB grid data ↓
You own and run UK Energy Co. Control and run coal, gas, wind, solar, hydro and battery storage assets, watch the market in real time, and learn how the UK power market actually works by playing, not reading.
Free for 7 days — no card required. £4.99/month after that.
Or play a 2-minute sample day first — no account needed →
Every half-hour, the market stacks plants cheapest-first until demand is met. The last plant needed sets the price for everyone. That's the whole mechanic.
Real screenshots from the free sample day — a modelled day, not live market prices.
A simplified six-plant fleet to show the idea — the game's numbers differ, and none of this is live market data.
Play the sample day →Every half-hour, every plant on the grid bids at its marginal cost. Cheapest first, up the stack, until demand is met. The most expensive plant needed sets the price for everyone running that tick — including you, whether you're the cheap baseload or the plant that just tipped the market. It's never a replay of history. It's computed, tick by tick, from what you and the rest of the stack decide to do.
Two plants to start — a coal baseload and a gas peaker. Yours to run, hold back, or push through a breakdown.
When your plant is the one clearing the market, you'll know — a live callout fires the moment it happens.
Coal carries a heavier carbon adder than gas, baked into the price before any trading mechanic exists.
Half-hour settlement periods, matching how Great Britain's real grid actually publishes its data.
This isn't an abstracted mini-game with invented rules. It's genuine merit-order economics — why gas so often sets the price even when coal is cheaper to burn, why a cold snap sends everyone's bill up, why the marginal plant matters more than the average one. Play it enough and you understand the real grid, not just this one.
Dispatch runs itself by default. Watch the system work — the way you'd let an assistant manager handle scouting before you start picking the tactics yourself. Step in only when it matters: a maintenance call, a bet that price rises later, a one-off offer worth taking.
Run a plant degraded to save money and it might fail on you. Let demand outstrip supply and the lights go out — a named event, a penalty, a dent in your Reliability Score.
One decision between days, never a wall of options. Short enough for a coffee break, real enough to matter.
See merit-order dispatch and price formation happen live instead of reading about them in a textbook diagram.
Already know the jargon? Good — this skips the hand-holding and gets straight to fleet decisions, hedging, and the clearing price.
Run a cold snap or a gas price spike yourself and watch exactly why the most expensive plant on the grid decides what everyone pays.
A few minutes a day, real decisions with real trade-offs, and a leaderboard to compare notes with everyone else playing the same scenario.
On the roadmap, not yet built: demand response.
Fixed scenarios — a cold snap, a supply shock, a calm Sunday — identical for every player, every time. Submit your best profit and see where you rank, with the board resetting fresh every week.
Play most days and keep the streak alive. Miss too many and it resets — a small, honest reason to come back.
A fresh scenario every ISO week, with its own leaderboard, on top of the six fixed Challenge Days.
Trade against actual historical national demand and settlement prices from Great Britain's grid, with the real price overlaid on your chart.
Revenue by fuel type, how often you set the market price, profit left on the table — a running report across your whole campaign.
Live UK Data is the real thing — actual national demand and settlement prices for a real date, pulled from Elexon's Insights Solution API, the same public data source Great Britain's own electricity market runs on.
The six fixed Challenge Days (a cold snap, a supply shock, and so on) are different: illustrative scenarios modelled on well-known, broadly reported patterns in how the grid behaves — not a literal replay of one specific date's real prices. Good for learning the shape of these situations, not a citation.
We'd rather tell you the difference than blur it.
The full game — coal, gas, wind, solar, hydro, battery storage, Challenge Days, leaderboards, the weekly challenge, real UK grid data and your career report — is yours from the moment you sign up. No card required to start the trial; you only enter payment details if you choose to keep playing after day 7.