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.
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.
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.
(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?
(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)
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.
That's correct, it's using data from Open Infrastructure Map which is itself based on OpenStreetMap data. That's a good idea to zoom in further to show them off a bit more.
I actually have plans to include Ireland and Northern Ireland once I get the GB side nailed down. The data seems to be mostly available though I'd have to really think about how to make it work well on the app as it'd be a pretty fundamental change to how things currently work (assumes a single market).
Yup, that's exactly it! When you zoom in you get to see the wind farms and wind turbines using data from the amazing Open Infrastructure Map [0]. I also show the cables for the offshore wind farms.
The demand flexibility aspect is already being explored: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...
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