UK total wind generation record beaten today | Hacker News Reader

UK total wind generation record beaten today

renewables-map.robinhawkes.com

57 pointsmartinald33 comments

Oh cool, that's my website! Let me know if you have any questions about it and I'll do my best to answer them.

Great website! Can you describe the potential output? There is a little i sign but I can't click it on Firefox mobile.

Indeed! That's including available wind generation that was curtailed (not used) due to transmission constraints. So it's the actual output plus the amount of output that was "lost" because we had to switch off some wind farms, even though the wind was there to generate more.

Apparently they've announced some plan to sell this power cheaply to local people on the same side of the bottleneck, though I've not seen the details yet.

Seems to be another one of those sensible ideas that needs a global crisis to be pushed through to reality.

Yup! Looks like it'll be some form of regional demand flexibility, similar to what suppliers like Octopus Energy (disclaimer: my employer) and others have experimented with over the past few years.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...

(edit: I see you answered a sibling comment with the same question. TL;DR: Potential output is the output pretending that curtailment did not apply. Thanks!)

A UI or terminology question: when 'Potential output' says it is 'Including curtailment', does this mean that it pretends that curtailment doesn't apply, or that it subtracts the curtailed power from the total available so that the total power shown is only the power actually transmitted (exported) to the grid? It's very likely that I'm just not familiar enough with the terms, but this wasn't immediately clear. My guess is the former meaning, although I can imagine it meaning either.

Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar?

> Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar?

https://app.electricitymaps.com/

(for most US grids, ElectricityMaps consumes somewhat delayed EIA Balancing Agency generation mix data from https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... ; their data is mostly live for system operators that provide live data on their own website, CAISO in California and ERCOT in Texas, for example)

Very cool! This is fun to watch.

Now I'm wondering how residential rooftop solar is accounted for... presumably there are houses in these grids which export solar electricity or offset grid power with solar production. The utility supplies data to this site, and the utility would only know about the energy produced by residential solar if each KWh of exported or offset energy were reported somehow. I'd imagine that's a pretty tough problem, particularly in the offset scenario.

In Australia [1], a data provider (APVI [2]) collaborates to provide this data in the aggregate, and so it can be surfaced distinctly as rooftop solar. In the US, it manifests as reduced demand (“behind the meter generation”) during daylight hours.

[1] https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&...

[2] https://apvi.org.au/

Excellent Site!

What are the lines that cross Scotland ? At time of writing they are red where as other lines further south are green.

I know of some on shore wind up near the Rochdale area too. Does it mean they are offline if they just appear as black dots on the map?

Those are NESO (system operator) grid boundaries. The colours represent the forecast flow of energy over each boundary in relation to the capacity of each boundary. Green means lots of extra capacity, red means over capacity. When a boundary exceed capacity it's likely that this constraint will result in wind farms being turned off to reduce output "behind" the constraint.

The black dots are wind farms and other power assets that don't have any generation data. This is usually because they aren't connected to the transmission system, not that they aren't actually outputting. Or to put it another way, I only have data on power assets connected directly to the main transmission grid.

I must say it was quite windy for the last couple of days. When I say "quite windy" I mean I saw people saying they were blown off their bike :)

Not surprised either. I'm down in Wales & I could hear the glass pane shaking

Love your stuff Robin. The graphs and wind turbine model are particular favourites

How can we fix the curtailment problem? Storage nearer the turbines or just more transmission capacity generally? I presume we'd saturate storage pretty quickly so is it just a case of running more grid wiring from Scotland to say.. Manchester?

Thanks! The ultimate fix is to finish upgrading the aging grid. There are other things that can improve the situation however, such as building wind farms away from these constraints, storage (but these can sometimes exacerbate constraints), demand flexibility (eg. place demand above constraints), zonal/regional pricing, and probably more I can't remember off the top of my head.

The demand flexibility aspect is already being explored: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...

meanwhile in the US

https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...

Meanwhile the average EE prices for business in USD/kWh:

UK: 0.442 USA: 0.148 India: 0.124 China: 0.097 Russia: 0.096

What is the implication your going for?

its unaffordable

Poor research then, as end user prices are unfortunately not correlated with the cost of renewables.

In the land of the ignorant, the man with one fact is king

Other Europe countries will be a better comparison. Domestic energy prices in Russia are de-facto set by the state so it’s not a useful data point. Don’t know about India but in developing countries electricity prices are often subsidised by the state as a matter of social policy (which IMHO is a bad idea as people who consume more benefit the most).

Great website! It would be even more great if it compared total wind generation with total UK power usage for the same time period (with a % for wind power usage).

You can see percentage here: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live

Some context would make it more interesting. How much of it was used? How much does wind contribute to full day consumption?

https://grid.iamkate.com/

In Ireland, we’re running at about 75% renewables for the day, with most of that being wind. The absolute numbers are smaller, but that’s a peak of about 500 MW of solar and 3.6GW of wind, against something like 5-6Gw of demand.

I shed a little more light on the context via my map which you can also find linked on the page: https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com

Not to steal from Robin's excellent work, you can see how much it's been (low carbon/renewables generation) over the last twelve months at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/GB/12mo/monthly (~56% renewables, ~73% low carbon)

(Robin, if there is a way to see this on your site, I could not find it, my apologies!)

Not at all, my stuff is very niche and the other websites and dashboards do a much better job at filling in the higher-level context.

And yet we’re about to face an eye watering increase in bills due to the way we’re charged for energy.

Congrats Robin.

Thanks! Always a surprise and a pleasure seeing my stuff on here

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