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Oh cool, that's my website! Let me know if you have any questions about it and I'll do my best to answer them.

by robhawkes 6mo ago

countrymile 6mo ago
Great website! Can you describe the potential output? There is a little i sign but I can't click it on Firefox mobile.
- robhawkes 6mo ago
  Indeed! That's including available wind generation that was curtailed (not used) due to transmission constraints. So it's the actual output plus the amount of output that was "lost" because we had to switch off some wind farms, even though the wind was there to generate more.
  - ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
    Apparently they've announced some plan to sell this power cheaply to local people on the same side of the bottleneck, though I've not seen the details yet. Seems to be another one of those sensible ideas that needs a global crisis to be pushed through to reality.
    - robhawkes 6mo ago
      Yup! Looks like it'll be some form of regional demand flexibility, similar to what suppliers like Octopus Energy (disclaimer: my employer) and others have experimented with over the past few years. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-in-solar-available-within-months https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...
nhecker 6mo ago
(edit: I see you answered a sibling comment with the same question. TL;DR: Potential output is the output pretending that curtailment did not apply. Thanks!) A UI or terminology question: when 'Potential output' says it is 'Including curtailment', does this mean that it pretends that curtailment doesn't apply, or that it subtracts the curtailed power from the total available so that the total power shown is only the power actually transmitted (exported) to the grid? It's very likely that I'm just not familiar enough with the terms, but this wasn't immediately clear. My guess is the former meaning, although I can imagine it meaning either. Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar?
- toomuchtodo 6mo ago
  > Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar? https://app.electricitymaps.com/ https://app.electricitymaps.com/ (for most US grids, ElectricityMaps consumes somewhat delayed EIA Balancing Agency generation mix data from https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... ; their data is mostly live for system operators that provide live data on their own website, CAISO in California and ERCOT in Texas, for example)
  - nhecker 6mo ago
    Very cool! This is fun to watch. Now I'm wondering how residential rooftop solar is accounted for... presumably there are houses in these grids which export solar electricity or offset grid power with solar production. The utility supplies data to this site, and the utility would only know about the energy produced by residential solar if each KWh of exported or offset energy were reported somehow. I'd imagine that's a pretty tough problem, particularly in the offset scenario.
    - toomuchtodo 6mo ago
      In Australia [1], a data provider (APVI [2]) collaborates to provide this data in the aggregate, and so it can be surfaced distinctly as rooftop solar. In the US, it manifests as reduced demand (“behind the meter generation”) during daylight hours. [1] https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&... [2] https://apvi.org.au/ https://apvi.org.au/
mcrmonkey 6mo ago
Excellent Site! What are the lines that cross Scotland ? At time of writing they are red where as other lines further south are green. I know of some on shore wind up near the Rochdale area too. Does it mean they are offline if they just appear as black dots on the map?
- robhawkes 6mo ago
  Those are NESO (system operator) grid boundaries. The colours represent the forecast flow of energy over each boundary in relation to the capacity of each boundary. Green means lots of extra capacity, red means over capacity. When a boundary exceed capacity it's likely that this constraint will result in wind farms being turned off to reduce output "behind" the constraint. The black dots are wind farms and other power assets that don't have any generation data. This is usually because they aren't connected to the transmission system, not that they aren't actually outputting. Or to put it another way, I only have data on power assets connected directly to the main transmission grid.

Oh cool, that's my website! Let me know if you have any questions about it and I'll do my best to answer them.

countrymile 6mo ago

Great website! Can you describe the potential output? There is a little i sign but I can't click it on Firefox mobile.

robhawkes 6mo ago
Indeed! That's including available wind generation that was curtailed (not used) due to transmission constraints. So it's the actual output plus the amount of output that was "lost" because we had to switch off some wind farms, even though the wind was there to generate more.
- ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
  Apparently they've announced some plan to sell this power cheaply to local people on the same side of the bottleneck, though I've not seen the details yet. Seems to be another one of those sensible ideas that needs a global crisis to be pushed through to reality.
  - robhawkes 6mo ago
    Yup! Looks like it'll be some form of regional demand flexibility, similar to what suppliers like Octopus Energy (disclaimer: my employer) and others have experimented with over the past few years. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-in-solar-available-within-months https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...

nhecker 6mo ago

(edit: I see you answered a sibling comment with the same question. TL;DR: Potential output is the output pretending that curtailment did not apply. Thanks!) A UI or terminology question: when 'Potential output' says it is 'Including curtailment', does this mean that it pretends that curtailment doesn't apply, or that it subtracts the curtailed power from the total available so that the total power shown is only the power actually transmitted (exported) to the grid? It's very likely that I'm just not familiar enough with the terms, but this wasn't immediately clear. My guess is the former meaning, although I can imagine it meaning either. Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar?

toomuchtodo 6mo ago
> Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar? https://app.electricitymaps.com/ https://app.electricitymaps.com/ (for most US grids, ElectricityMaps consumes somewhat delayed EIA Balancing Agency generation mix data from https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... ; their data is mostly live for system operators that provide live data on their own website, CAISO in California and ERCOT in Texas, for example)
- nhecker 6mo ago
  Very cool! This is fun to watch. Now I'm wondering how residential rooftop solar is accounted for... presumably there are houses in these grids which export solar electricity or offset grid power with solar production. The utility supplies data to this site, and the utility would only know about the energy produced by residential solar if each KWh of exported or offset energy were reported somehow. I'd imagine that's a pretty tough problem, particularly in the offset scenario.
  - toomuchtodo 6mo ago
    In Australia [1], a data provider (APVI [2]) collaborates to provide this data in the aggregate, and so it can be surfaced distinctly as rooftop solar. In the US, it manifests as reduced demand (“behind the meter generation”) during daylight hours. [1] https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&... [2] https://apvi.org.au/ https://apvi.org.au/

mcrmonkey 6mo ago

Excellent Site! What are the lines that cross Scotland ? At time of writing they are red where as other lines further south are green. I know of some on shore wind up near the Rochdale area too. Does it mean they are offline if they just appear as black dots on the map?

robhawkes 6mo ago
Those are NESO (system operator) grid boundaries. The colours represent the forecast flow of energy over each boundary in relation to the capacity of each boundary. Green means lots of extra capacity, red means over capacity. When a boundary exceed capacity it's likely that this constraint will result in wind farms being turned off to reduce output "behind" the constraint. The black dots are wind farms and other power assets that don't have any generation data. This is usually because they aren't connected to the transmission system, not that they aren't actually outputting. Or to put it another way, I only have data on power assets connected directly to the main transmission grid.