Very exciting project, from a fellow ex-woodmacker. Will get in touch
Thanks fellow ex-WoodMacker! I'll keep an eye open
Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#72Cool 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 f…
Fair assessment. There is space for panels, but I suspect I'll need more of them because the duration of exposure is not what it needs to be optimal. This is the turbine I looked at: https://www.amazon.com/ZHIHUASMTBX-Vertical-Generator-Levita...
My idea was to utilize a combination of solar and this.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#73Interesting 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…
What's going on with Seagreen? It's got a forecast of 4MW, and a listed output of 545MW at roughly half capacity, in what seems like pretty light winds.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#74Does 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/
Have you seen Global Wind Atlas? https://globalwindatlas.info/en
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#75How come dogger bank is sat out there where there looks to be plenty of wind, but generating zero?
It's in the works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forewind
(A more informative link would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_Wind_Farm .)
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#76This 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 :)
Annual sunshine is around 1300 hours in Glasgow, 1400 hours in Manchester, 1500 hours in Birmingham, 1700 hours in London and Paris, 2500 hours in Rome and 3500 hours in Cairo.
So it's not so sunny, especially as you go north, but films/TV do exaggerate the problem. "I'm from London" regularly gets a comment about terrible weather, "I'm from Paris" does not.
There's very little solar power in Scotland, as you'd expect: https://electricityproduction.uk/plant/solar/map/
(Figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London#Climate and so on.)
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#77Really illustrates the potential benefits of offshore wind farms. It seems like there's a large overall difference between wind speeds on the land and in the water, especially far off coast.
One of the most interesting findings from building this was to see just how important a distributed wind energy system is. The new offshore mega-projects like Dogger Bank are going to make a huge difference, and more onshore development will help with localised generation as well (avoiding transmission capacity issues, etc). It's been fascinating to watch the various weather patterns over time to see where the gaps a…
I was looking into this recently and future developments look exciting. There seems to be plenty of shallow water ripe for development similar to the north sea but there is also some focus on floating platforms too.
My casual observation is that it’s generally windy somewhere around the coast, and when not in one area like the north sea it is windy of the south west or south coast. And vice versa.
Once we build out farms around the four axis of the coast im sure the base load generated in aggregate will rise quite a bit.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#78I'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.
Glad to see another deck.gl user!
deck.gl focuses on vector data, whereas WeatherLayers GL adds raster capabilities. Actually, WeatherLayers GL is mostly custom WebGL shaders that could be implemented outside of deck.gl as well. The major reason why deck.gl is used is that it serves as an integration layer for popular map libraries. I've written deck.gl-leaflet [1] plugin myself.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#79I 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?
As Robin says, visualized wind data are 100m height from surface. That's what we've selected as the most appropriate average for wind farms. GFS contains different heights that we could allow choosing from.
Re: Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain
#80Does 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/
Have you seen Global Wind Atlas? https://globalwindatlas.info/en
Looks good thanks! Though it's giving system errors at the moment so I'll try back later.