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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Just an FYI,

All RTO/ISOs in the US have a variety of dashboards to describe realtime and historical information, as do the Canadian entities. So you can see the same thing for CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, MISO, PJM, ISO-NE...etc on their websites.

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Check out ElectricityMap.org, they scrape the independent dashboards (CAISO, NYISO, ISO-NE, ERCOT) for generation mix data, anything else (in the US) is pulled from EIA’s balancing authority API with a 6-12 hour lag (ElectricityMap uses machine learning to provide real time estimates based on historical data for data delayed zones, and it is spooky how accurate it is [Chile in particular] when the data backfills and “catches up”).

https://app.electricitymap.org

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

Edit: (can’t reply, HN throttling) @mardifoufs https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/hydro-quebec-could-l...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/maine-vote-hydro-quebec-1.6233...

(NIMBYs in Maine sandbagging export of clean hydro to New England ISOs)

Woah Quebec seems to have the lowest (?) Carbon intensity on the map. Hydro power is just amazing, and I'm glad we had very forward looking PMs back in the 60-70s who pushed for massive hydro projects even when the costs were gigantic. There's still so much hydro potential in the province that isn't being used though.

Makes me wonder if it would be possible to build up our hydro capacity specifically for export instead of just exporting our surpluses like we do now. Maybe it won't be profitable now, but would it be too energy inefficient to transport much more electricity from the north of the province to further south than New England?

There is a fair amount of missing / misleading data on that map, e.g. Brazil is the 25th largest consumer of coal[0], but the map claims 95+% of Brazil's energy consumption is renewable and lists their coal percentage as "?"

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...

The data for that link looks like it ends in 2016 for Brazil. ElectricityMap is parsing the data directly from the grid operator.

https://www.worldometers.info/coal/brazil-coal/#coal-consump...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49436 ("Brazil largely relies on hydropower for electricity generation; in 2020, hydropower supplied 66% of its electricity demand. Wind and solar generation have grown quickly in recent years and had a combined 11% share of the country’s electricity generation in 2020. Biomass accounted for an 8% share. Fossil fuel-fired plants made up another 12% of electricity generation, while nuclear power accounted for 2%.")

And yet everyone is critical of current mega projects that are being built now that will benefit future generations.

Site C in BC Muskrat falls in NL/Labrador Keeyask in Manitoba.

All while We benefit from paid down mega projects from decades ago that our predecessors had the grit to fund and build

Yes that deeply saddens me honestly. I had a friend work on the Site C turbines and what an amazing project. Just massive

As an immigrant it's amazing to see the complacency and also the hostility that some here have towards infrastructure development when in my home country it's probably the thing we'd want the most

There is a very nice volunteer made one for ERCOT that popped up during the freeze last year, on datadog no less.

https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/5c2fc00be-393be929c9c55c3b80b557d...

Much nicer than ERCOT's imho.

Ercot's is ok, and tells you things like solar and wind production. They're producing nearly 20 GW from wind right at this moment.

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