Great presentation of this data, i just lost 15 mins satisfying curiosity. Thanks :-)
Absolutely fascinating map!
Edit: As I typed that I thought "Rhynie sounds a bit Welsh (British)" and I checked and it might be related to the old old phrases for "king" - which seems appropriate for a place with a huge ancient fortress looming over it.
Seems like a nice complement with solar, given that they peak at each others inverse.
But yeah, "11 kW per hour" is meaningless.
Which is not a thing anybody ever does. Oh wait, it matters for peaking power plants and Marx generators but there you'd use Joules/sec/sec rather than kWh/h/h.
I had noticed the Norway interconnect was running at 0 MW, and I was trying different sites to see if it was the data feed.
It wasn’t, it seems Norway NO2 area has 50% water levels in its hydro dams, the rest seem OK but NO2 region is the one which exports power to UK, Germany, and Denmark.
The little animations of power moving along lines are very cool.
I work in this space (https://www.woodmac.com/), mostly with natural gas data but have worked on power in the past so I'm always interested to see if it's anyone I know (in this case it isn't).
Building something like this isn't really that difficult - all of the data is publicly accessible and if you can transform it and pull it into a database and build a front-end app then you're pretty much there. The developer has stated that the main source for this is https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/, but other good sources of energy data (across Europe) are https://transparency.entsoe.eu/ for power and https://transparency.entsog.eu/ for gas. Also useful are https://alsi.gie.eu/ for LNG imports and https://agsi.gie.eu/ for gas storage.
ARM is literally tweaking CPUs to be better at running Javascript: for example ARMv8.3 added a new float-to-int instruction with errors and out-of-range values handled the way that JavaScript wants.
Meaning, yes, typically, the most powerful devices for browsing the web are in fact phones.
Webapps that perform fine on an iPhone 14 can cause the latest i9-14900k to choke.. It’s hilarious.
This is part of why the Apple M-Series CPUs feel like magic. Lots of electron apps suddenly perform very well.
Also, I had that same CPU, it was a beast. :)
I meant the other way, years old phones are trouncing brand new top of line CPUs.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be surprised if renewables were a majority of the grid these days. It's just that this dashboard contains insufficient information to conclude that.
Solar accounts for ~5% of the actual output per https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity and https://www.renewableuk.com/news-and-resources/press-release...
edit: change source from https://grid.iamkate.com/
While domestic installations are counted, they aren't in OP's link. https://www.projectsolaruk.com/blog/latest-uk-solar-photovol...
[0] https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity
[1] https://www.renewableuk.com/news-and-resources/press-release...
Today there is an Atlantic storm so most the the country is grey but with sunny periods and windy.
In the depth of winter, solar only makes a contribution 3-4 hours per day, which kills the annual average.
You can buy single panels from the supermarket and plug them in on your balcony! That's amazing.
And that modularity directly drives the competition which reduces the prices of the modules themselves and the many competing solar farms at many different scales racing to connect to the grid and delivering on or under budget on cost and time.
What a time to be alive.
The "interconnectors" are more evidence this isn't really about generators, but grid entry points. The interconnectors are connections to the French, Danish, etc. grids.
There is both a load and generator resource for a battery and is some markets it will register as such. So no it’s not creating net new but will often but bucketed in a generator category for the purposes of looking at mix.
So when people talk about the “generation mix,” batteries get bucketed alongside gas, wind, solar, etc. Not because they magically create energy, but because from the grid operator’s perspective they look like a dispatchable generator when discharging.
It’s one of those cases where common-sense semantics (“it’s storage”) diverge from industry practice (“it’s modeled as generation”).
Please let me know what’s confusing.
And frankly I can't find evidence for the claim that the energy sector uses the term generation for inputs to the grid in general, as opposed to just the things literally generating electricity. Which does not surprise me.
That doesnt make them a generator. Other grids are sources of energy as well. Are they generators?
Again, I see absolutely nothing published anywhere classifying batteries as generators. It's a source. It's an input into the grid. But how can you argue all grid inputs are considered a generator, therefor batteries are generators? You seem quite alone in that.
If you don’t like the terminology, take it up with the grid operators. That’s how the industry classifies it, whether you agree with the wording or not.
Again, I have no idea what you are trying to argue. We all understand how batteries work, yes they are not magic. From a fuel mix perspective or “generation” perspective they are lumped together. Most folks who are looking at this data recognize batteries are not magic, not sure why you are hung up on this.
Dispatchable power is what matters if you are managing a grid. If you have lots of dispatchable power, you can deal with peaks and dips (both are valuable) in demand very rapidly and relatively cheaply. Long term, daily, and seasonal trends are fairly predictable. Even the weather is short term fairly predictable.
Battery adds a lot of predictability to grids. If you have hours to plan for it, you can bring online gas if needed (coal and nuclear are not typically kept around in a mothballed state for this). If it's seconds, you are screwed because that is non dispatchable power (you need to plan to have it and spend money to get it online). That's the gap batteries fill.
Anything with flywheels (gas, coal plants, etc.) needs time to (literally) spin up. And before that happens you first need to generate steam by boiling a large amount of cold water. Some gas plants can start relatively quickly but then run less efficiently. You can trade off dispatchability for efficiency. It means expending a lot of fuel just to get the thing started that otherwise delivers no power. They provide a lot of power once they are up and running but they are kind of useless when you need that power right away. And the more often you shut them down, the more you lose on spinning them up again.
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
* https://www.ieso.ca/market-data
The output for individual generators is available at:
* https://sygration.rodanenergy.com/gendata/today.html
(AIUI, historical data available for a fee.)
Here's a kinda related site that I think is neat: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
I wonder, does residential solar with export count towards this sort of thing?
Presumably residential export is fairly small relative to everything else, but anecdotally, I export enough daily to run another home the size of mine.
EDIT: Clarify a sentence
It isn't displayed on this website, or at least not all of them, I checked by looking for an installation that I know exists that is on a feed in tariff and it wasn't shown.
To be fair to the creators of this website, it's probably quite hard to gather and display this type of residential solar information.
Aside from that, my real wonder was whether residential solar is factored into national renewables or if it's simply too little to be worth it.
This might be very helpful in understanding how to correctly allocate the infrastructure to enable distributed production at the right place. What kind of reversible flow is possible ? What types of electrical equipment is needed etc.
I feel finally we are at a place where grid cost might be much higher than solar and batteries when amortized over 20-25 years.
UK to finish with coal power after 142 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695587 - September 2024 (63 comments)
Britain's reliance on coal-fired power set to end after 140 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443347 - September 2024 (70 comments)
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle...
https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-ventures/intercon...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly
As a general rule, the imports are imported because they are cheaper and generally cheaper means cleaner.
There are a lot of offshore wind sites at various stages of construction/planning - some that are amongst the largest in the world.
unglaublich•1d ago
https://app.electricitymaps.com/
Iv•1d ago