Cool to see windfarm discussion here. I live in the PNW, love where I live but I have a ton of trees so my solar eligible square footage is pretty modest when juxtaposed to my goals of getting off grid. I recently found out that home turbines are a thing, and I'm hoping with a combination of the two I can achieve my goals. That said, we have no data for this sort of thing, so I'm in the domain of a blind investment. I'd love to hear feedback if folks have experience.
Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#62I'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…
Amazing piece of data visualization. I work with deck.gl at my day job, and it's really cool to see how far people can push it.
I have a random question - what layer are you using to draw the country borders on the base map? It really stands out, and helps tie the styling together.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#63Beautiful work. We're having some pretty odd winds here in NL right now and the North of France is also seeing eastern winds, very odd for this time of year and the resulting cold snap is going to impact crops in a wide region. It might even freeze here tonight, which rarely happens this late in the year.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#64Hi Rob! I have a request from an avid user of your visualisations in the Octopus Energy App. Could you please switch the y axis on real time data from Octopus Home Mini from Wh/min to just instant Watts? kWh/day makes sense on larger time scales but Wh/min is pretty meaningless to most people. Also it seems like it would be more readable as a line graph with datapoints, than a bar chart. A line graph would also allow…
Hey! So the Home Mini visuals in the app aren't something I'm personally involved in but I'll make sure to pass on the suggestion for you.
Thank you!
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#65Cool to see windfarm discussion here. I live in the PNW, love where I live but I have a ton of trees so my solar eligible square footage is pretty modest when juxtaposed to my goals of getting off grid. I recently found out that home turbines are a thing, and I'm hoping with a combination of the two I can achieve my goals. That said, we have no data for this sort of thing, so I'm in the domain of a blind investment.…
Isn't the problem with a home turbine the low capacity? E.g. a typical backyard turbine might be good for 1000-1500W at peak output, and it's still pretty big and wants to be mounted on a 20 foot pole. The good ones are kind of expensive, too.
I'd wonder if you have a lot of trees if you'd ever get much output from a turbine anyway. At a certain point, if you want legitimate solar or wind power, you probably end up finding a spot to clear some tree cover. Grab a pallet of dirt cheap used panels from SanTan and throw 'em out on the ground.
Personally I probably wouldn't even think about wind unless I lived out in eastern Oregon or Washington on the plains, with big enough property that I could get a halfway decent size turbine and mount it far enough from the house so I couldn't hear it.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#66I'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…
Amazing piece of data visualization. I work with deck.gl at my day job, and it's really cool to see how far people can push it. I have a random question - what layer are you using to draw the country borders on the base map? It really stands out, and helps tie the styling together.
Thanks! All the Deck.gl parts are thanks to the work by Jan and WeatherLayers.
The countries layer is using this dataset from MapTiler [1] which is also the service I'm using for all the base maps and vector tile data. I then used interleaved layers [2] in Deck.gl / MapLibre to place the wind layers behind the country outlines.
[1] https://www.maptiler.com/countries/ [2] https://deck.gl/gallery/mapbox-layer
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think hydro and tidal power is renewable right?
Sure is! I'm limited by the way the generation is broken down in the source data [1] as it doesn't make any distinction for tidal generation – though I'd argue that's probably a very small amount in the UK. Hydro is already separated though.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#68I know wind varies a lot with altitude and there are a lot of available maps of wind such as 2m, 10m, 850mb, 250mb, etc. What altitude wind are you showing on the vis and what are the heights of these wind farms?
That's a great point and something I'm not making clear on the map. I've decided to use wind speeds at 100m on the map but there's an argument to offer data at multiple heights, particularly when looking at shorter onshore wind farms.
With that said, some of the wind turbines already reach 190m in height (eg. Hornsea One) and the mega-sized Haliade-X turbines at the upcoming Dogger Bank wind farm are 260m tall!
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#69I'v seen charts (someone posted on HN as a comment) where it shows generated electricity by type: solar, hidro, wind, gas, etc and by hour, for many countries. Anyone can bring up the link?
I’m working on one for the United States! It also has a lot more data about grid operations like wholesale pricing of electricity https://www.gridstatus.io/
Awesome! Just wanted to say that I love what you're doing with GridStatus – I've been keeping an eye on your work on Twitter.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#70Very exciting project, from a fellow ex-woodmacker. Will get in touch