Getting Started

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

pip install openelectricity

npm install openelectricity

bun 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.

from openelectricity import OEClient

client = OEClient()

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.

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)

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`

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.)
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",
    )

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:

Field	Description
metric	The metric name (power)
unit	Unit of measurement (MW)
results	Array 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

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

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

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)

import { OpenElectricityClient } from "openelectricity"

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`

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

console.table(datatable.toConsole())

Next steps