name: NESO Data Portal Rate Limits
description: Rate limiting policies for the National Energy System Operator Data
  Portal APIs. The portal uses separate rate limits for the CKAN catalog API and
  the Datastore (tabular data query) API. No authentication is required; limits
  apply to all anonymous users equally.
rateLimits:
  - name: CKAN Catalog API Rate Limit
    description: The CKAN catalog API enforces a maximum of one request per second.
      Applies to endpoints such as organization_list, package_list, tag_list,
      package_search, resource_search, resource_show, and package_show.
    baseURL: https://api.neso.energy/api/3/action/
    limit: 1
    unit: second
    scope: per-user
    endpoints:
      - /organization_list
      - /package_list
      - /tag_list
      - /package_search
      - /resource_search
      - /resource_show
      - /package_show
    guidance: >
      Avoid polling continuously. Before querying a dataset, check the resource
      modification date via resource_show to determine whether new data is available,
      rather than re-fetching the full dataset on each run.

  - name: Datastore API Rate Limit
    description: The Datastore API (tabular data queries) enforces a stricter limit
      of a maximum of two requests per minute. Applies to datastore_search and
      datastore_search_sql endpoints.
    baseURL: https://api.neso.energy/api/3/action/
    limit: 2
    unit: minute
    scope: per-user
    endpoints:
      - /datastore_search
      - /datastore_search_sql
    guidance: >
      Use specific filters (field selections, WHERE clauses, date ranges) to
      retrieve only the data you need per request. The SQL endpoint supports
      full PostgreSQL syntax for complex queries. Field names and resource IDs
      require double-quoting in SQL queries.

  - name: Carbon Intensity API Rate Limit
    description: No explicit rate limits are documented for the Carbon Intensity
      API (api.carbonintensity.org.uk). The API is openly accessible and designed
      for programmatic access by developers and smart device integrations.
    baseURL: https://api.carbonintensity.org.uk
    limit: null
    unit: null
    scope: public
    guidance: >
      No rate limit is documented. Use reasonable request pacing and cache
      responses locally where appropriate, especially for historical and forecast
      data that does not change frequently.

notes:
  - source: https://www.neso.energy/data-portal/api-guidance
    retrieved: '2026-06-13'