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Comment by raphaelj | Hacker News Reader

Where do you get that data from? I checked on electicityMap [1] and the British wind farms are producing more than 6 GW at the moment [2].

[1] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB

[2] https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png

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https://gridwatch.org.uk/

currently 0.63 GW.

That's interesting that they disagree. Gridwatch has been around a while but I'll have a look.

edit: yep, electricitymap's free figures are not even close to live.

It looks like electricitymap is showing "estimated" data for the UK. It's fairly calm at the moment, and it probably doesn't take weather into account when estimating.

I think "estimated" is a recent addition they show, when the input data sources fail. Which unfortunately they do quite often. But then, I am not paying for the service, so who am I to complain? :)

When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.

Could also be called "fraudulent" data

Not so. Fraud requires an intent to deceive to make unlawful (or unfair) gains. They're probably just abiding by the license of the data or struggling with a technical limitation.

lol - fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? Fraud comes into play any time someone intentionally tries to mislead - for whatever reason. And there has been plenty of fraud around energy reporting - again, for various reasons.

> fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from?

The common and legal definition of "fraud".

Yep, this. Fraud is not a synonym of "lie" or "wrong".

Someone is gaining from wind farms claiming power output numbers they don't produce. This website is grossly overestimating the output of wind farms. Seems plausible there's a relationship between those.

It seems the technical problems are resolved and currently the data is no longer "estimated". 3% of the consumption comes from wind, and 17% from solar, which isn't to bad. While the UK certainly isn't the optimal place for solar power, it shows that it can deliver a large contribution. Especially as there is still so much roof area to use that it should be a no-brainer.

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