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Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

renewables-map.robinhawkes.com

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Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#41

Post by robhawkes »

giarc wrote: post #33
jeffwass wrote: post #18

This is cool Robin! Do you also have access to solar data? Eg, I am a UK homeowner w/ a recent solar installation on my roof, would be curious to see how that looks too.

Sorry but isn't 'UK' and 'solar installation' an odd couple? My perception, based upon 40 years of western media consumption is that it's hardly sunny in the UK. I'm ready to be corrected though :)

Solar isn't an area I'm that familiar with but we have no issues generating plenty of electricity from the sun in the UK.

There's a great site [1] that calculates total solar generation around the UK using a mix of real data and forecasts. We were generating at 5GW around midday and that number will only increase.

[1] https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#43

Post by toomuchtodo »

robhawkes wrote: post #32
toomuchtodo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ElectrictyMap.org uses a parsing engine to aggregate as many publicly available ISO/TSO/BAs to show live generation mix and cross border energy movement data when possible, and falls back to ML generated estimates otherwise. https://app.electricitymap.org/map?wind=false&solar=false https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b... Beautiful project you've done, really enjoy the visualizations. (no assoc…

This is amazing, thanks for the detail! I'll set aside some time to have a proper dig through the Electricity Map sources – looks like it will help me expand my map beyond GB.

Feel free to join their Slack as well, friendly folks if you have any questions.

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#44

Post by erentz »

Does anyone know of a good tool for modeling wind potential?

For example, PVWatts [1] makes it very easy to get solar potential for a site (at hourly granularity). But having trouble finding something similar for wind. Ideally want something that is also validated against data from real world wind farms after they're built.

[1] https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#45

Post by robhawkes »

rmccue wrote: post #34

Interesting to see where wind farms look like they're underperforming; i.e. where wind farms in high wind seem to be producing a lower percentage of their theoretical output than others in low wind areas. Is that a problem with the data accuracy, or is that reflective of the real-world situation (e.g. misalignment of the turbines against the wind)? (p.s. thanks for your work at Octopus!)

This could be for a number of reasons, such as:

- Wind speeds are from GFS forecasts and cover quite a wide area - The realtime generation data from the balancing system isn't 100% precise and is averages over a 30-minute period - Some wind farms are simply much more efficient, especially large offshore ones - Individual turbines might be down for maintenance and/or not running efficiently - Localised issues like wake effects and turbulence

I'm not an expert in all this though so take it with a pinch of salt – I'm just very interested in it all and love making visualisations about it.

All that said, one of the intents behind creating the map is to highlight exactly this sort of stuff and to spark a discussion around why it might be.

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#46

Post by robhawkes »

Telemark70 wrote: post #36
robhawkes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! So I don't have solar data yet but I plan to first add aggregated solar using something like Sheffield Solar. Long term I plan to predict solar generation at a project/individual level using weather data and generation models. There's some previous work in this area by others so I imagine my near future will be spent digging through various papers on the subject.

Please would you give a URL for Sheffield Solar. I found sheffieldsolar.co.uk but could not find any data within that site.

Here you go: https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#47

Post by limbicsystem »

From this map you might think that the UK is currently depending (96.5%) on fossil fuels. But it's not quite that bad: https://grid.iamkate.com/

The real eye-opener (for me) on the latter display is the emissions per kwh over all time - dropped steadily from 500g in (only!) 2012 to a steady 150g or so recently. Encouraging!

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#48

Post by g_p »

robhawkes wrote: post #45
rmccue wrote: post #34

Interesting to see where wind farms look like they're underperforming; i.e. where wind farms in high wind seem to be producing a lower percentage of their theoretical output than others in low wind areas. Is that a problem with the data accuracy, or is that reflective of the real-world situation (e.g. misalignment of the turbines against the wind)? (p.s. thanks for your work at Octopus!)

This could be for a number of reasons, such as: - Wind speeds are from GFS forecasts and cover quite a wide area - The realtime generation data from the balancing system isn't 100% precise and is averages over a 30-minute period - Some wind farms are simply much more efficient, especially large offshore ones - Individual turbines might be down for maintenance and/or not running efficiently - Localised issues like wak…

Also another reason - a generation site may be curtailed, meaning that its output is restricted due to grid capacity limitations, and allowing it to export more energy onto the local power network may exceed safe operating parameters for the lines connecting the generation site to the grid.

Therefore in high wind, you would expect that in areas of dense generation, especially those with limited capacity interconnects to the rest of the grid, curtailment may be seen.

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#49

Post by robhawkes »

limbicsystem wrote: post #47

From this map you might think that the UK is currently depending (96.5%) on fossil fuels. But it's not quite that bad: https://grid.iamkate.com/ The real eye-opener (for me) on the latter display is the emissions per kwh over all time - dropped steadily from 500g in (only!) 2012 to a steady 150g or so recently. Encouraging!

This is a good point – I'm not currently accounting for solar in the aggregate and I'm lumping everything else as "non-renewable" which is true but not ideal as it's not all fossil fuels.

I'm going to look at how to be a little more accurate with this, similar to Kate's great website.

Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

#50

Post by vixen99 »

kitd wrote: post #37
zakjan wrote: post #17

I'm here to answer for WeatherLayers, AMA! I'm super happy to help @robhawkes with this project. WeatherLayers consists of two products, that can be used either together or separately: - WeatherLayers GL is a frontend visualisation library with deck.gl layers which can be integrated with common map libraries. The library can be used either with custom self-hosted data or with WeatherLayers Cloud. - WeatherLayers Clou…

> WeatherLayers Cloud is a cloud service Finally, a cloud service that has met it's true calling :)

its
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