[HN Gopher] Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm g...
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Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in
Great Britain
GB Renewables Map an energy experiment created entirely in my free
time (day job is visualisation at Octopus Energy). It's an
interactive map showing live generation for major wind farms in
Great Britain, showing what each wind farm is generating both now
and in the past, and where that generation is physically located.
Animated weather data is from WeatherLayers and shows current and
historic wind conditions on the map, providing context to wind
generation around the country. History mode allows you to go back
in time and see wind generation and weather conditions for a
particular date and time. It's great for exploring days of record
generation, such as the 21.6GW record on January 10th, 2023!
Prediction mode lets you see what wind farms are estimated to be
generating using current wind conditions and model based on
historic generation and wind speeds. Is a wind farm generating as
you expect, or is there something to look into? An experimental
feature allows you to see what future wind farms could be
generating today (or in the past!) if they were already built and
operational. If you click the "sparkle" button on the map you'll
get to see what the upcoming 3.6GW Dogger Bank wind farm is
estimated to generate if it was operational today. There's an
"About" section on the site that goes into detail on the various
public data sources and how some of the features work. I also
document a lot of this on my Twitter @robhawkes if you're curious.
This is just the start and there are many more features to come!
Please let me know your comments and suggestions.
Author : robhawkes
Score : 211 points
Date : 2023-04-26 11:53 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (renewables-map.robinhawkes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (renewables-map.robinhawkes.com)
| plopz wrote:
| I 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?
| robhawkes wrote:
| That's a great point and something I'm not making clear on the
| map. I've decided to use wind speeds at 100m on the map but
| there's an argument to offer data at multiple heights,
| particularly when looking at shorter onshore wind farms.
|
| With that said, some of the wind turbines already reach 190m in
| height (eg. Hornsea One) and the mega-sized Haliade-X turbines
| at the upcoming Dogger Bank wind farm are 260m tall!
| flir wrote:
| Suggestion: when I click on a windfarm's name, instead of
| removing all the other windfarms from the map, it should leave
| them but highlight the selected windfarm in some way.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to be spending some time
| soon on the UX so I'll add this to the list to look at.
| amerf1 wrote:
| Very exciting project, from a fellow ex-woodmacker. Will get in
| touch
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thanks fellow ex-WoodMacker! I'll keep an eye open
| jacquesm wrote:
| Beautiful work. We're having some pretty odd winds here in NL
| right now and the North of France is also seeing eastern winds,
| very odd for this time of year and the resulting cold snap is
| going to impact crops in a wide region. It might even freeze here
| tonight, which rarely happens this late in the year.
| insaider wrote:
| Nice! I worked on a similar project in Ireland - https://www.ux-
| design-awards.com/winners/2022-1-376-rtv-esb-...
| robhawkes wrote:
| This looks great! Is it publicly accessible anywhere? I
| couldn't find it.
|
| I'm hoping to expand beyond GB and Ireland would be a great
| next step if the data is publicly available.
| bulletsvshumans wrote:
| Really 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.
| robhawkes wrote:
| 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 are in the locations of wind
| farms around the UK. It'll be great once we fill in the big
| hole in capacity off the south-west coast.
| PuffinBlue wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| I was surprised to see that Wales is mostly orange:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#/media/File%3AGloba.
| ..
|
| The UK has had issues with limited transmission line capacity
| to Scotland which had led me to think that most of the
| generation potential was up there.
| robhawkes wrote:
| I live in North Wales so can confirm it's pretty windy here
| and we have a few onshore wind farms around here too. We've
| also a few decent-sized wind farms just off the coast like
| Gwynt y Mor.
|
| The Scotland thing is interesting as there's definitely
| issues with transmission constraints over the B6 boundary,
| though there's still benefits to building more wind farms
| for local consumption and/or storage as more batteries
| (especially) and pumped hydro capacity is added to the mix.
| Plus the National Grid have plans to expand capacity
| through to 2030 but I had to admit that's at the limit of
| my knowledge.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Also no NIMBYs on the North Sea. There's some angry fishermen
| and ecologists but for the most part "out of sight out of
| mind".
| jve wrote:
| I'v seen charts (someone posted on HN as a comment) where it
| shows generated electricity by type: solar, hidro, wind, gas, etc
| and by hour, for many countries. Anyone can bring up the link?
| kmax12 wrote:
| I'm working on one for the United States! It also has a lot
| more data about grid operations like wholesale pricing of
| electricity
|
| https://www.gridstatus.io/
| robhawkes wrote:
| Awesome! Just wanted to say that I love what you're doing
| with GridStatus - I've been keeping an eye on your work on
| Twitter.
| robhawkes wrote:
| There's a few like that but Electricity Maps is a good one
|
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
| helb wrote:
| I'm afraid we killed it... I see just a gray base map and the
| browser is getting a "504 Gateway timeout" from the API:
| This Serverless Function has timed out. Your connection
| is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly.
| 504: GATEWAY_TIMEOUT Code: FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT
| robhawkes wrote:
| Unfortunately yes. I'm working on a fix but it looks like the
| API I use for the generation data wasn't able to handle the
| influx of visitors. Not much I can do right now but I did
| upgrade my Vercel account to get a longer timeout at least.
|
| Hoping it'll be resolved soon.
| robhawkes wrote:
| It's back now... I'll keep an eye on it.
| wjdp wrote:
| Getting {"error":"Missing generation data"} now
| robhawkes wrote:
| Yeah, sorry about that! Turns out the Elexon API I use
| for the generation data doesn't like being on the HN
| front page. Lesson learnt that I should add a proxy store
| between their API and the map.
| helb wrote:
| Thanks!
| robhawkes wrote:
| The Elexon API is down again unfortunately. Lesson learnt
| that I should be storing this data myself in future to
| avoid it taking down the entire map.
| [deleted]
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| How come dogger bank is sat out there where there looks to be
| plenty of wind, but generating zero?
| robhawkes wrote:
| Good question! Dogger Bank is still under construction but I
| decided to include it on the map for now (it's a constant work
| in progress). If you click the little "sparkle" button on the
| right of the map you can see an estimation of what Dogger Bank
| would be generating today if it was operational.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's in the works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forewind
| Smaug123 wrote:
| (A more informative link would be
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_Wind_Farm .)
| bb123 wrote:
| Hi Rob! I have a request from an avid user of your visualisations
| in the Octopus Energy App. Could you please switch the y axis on
| real time data from Octopus Home Mini from Wh/min to just instant
| Watts? kWh/day makes sense on larger time scales but Wh/min is
| pretty meaningless to most people. Also it seems like it would be
| more readable as a line graph with datapoints, than a bar chart.
| A line graph would also allow for better interpolation between
| missing readings too.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Hey! So the Home Mini visuals in the app aren't something I'm
| personally involved in but I'll make sure to pass on the
| suggestion for you.
| bb123 wrote:
| Thank you!
| zakjan wrote:
| I'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 Cloud is a cloud service providing pre-processed
| data for visualization from common public weather data sources
| (NOAA, Copernicus).
|
| Athough it's a commercial project, there are ways to discuss a
| potential discount or even a free usage for a non-commercial
| project such as Robin's.
| thrway_blue123 wrote:
| 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.
| zakjan wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://github.com/zakjan/deck.gl-leaflet
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thanks! All the Deck.gl parts are thanks to the work by Jan
| and WeatherLayers.
|
| The countries layer is using this dataset from MapTiler [1]
| which is also the service I'm using for all the base maps and
| vector tile data. I then used interleaved layers [2] in
| Deck.gl / MapLibre to place the wind layers behind the
| country outlines.
|
| [1] https://www.maptiler.com/countries/ [2]
| https://deck.gl/gallery/mapbox-layer
| kitd wrote:
| _> WeatherLayers Cloud is a cloud service_
|
| Finally, a cloud service that has met it's true calling :)
| vixen99 wrote:
| its
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| Just wanted to say, as someone who works in the industry, wind
| FPNs are sometimes incorrect.
|
| Grid have access to "power available" signals, but this is not
| public data.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Absolutely! I chose FPN data as it's the best available to me
| in near realtime but as you say, it's not reliable.
|
| This is partly why I've been collaborating with someone on a
| prediction feature that tries to guess generation using
| realtime wind conditions and historic actual generation data at
| various wind speeds.
|
| I'm hoping to improve things as time goes on and I learn more
| about the underlying data (and its quirks).
| rmccue wrote:
| Interesting 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!)
| robhawkes wrote:
| 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 wake effects and turbulence
|
| I'm not an expert in all this though so take it with a pinch of
| salt - I'm just very interested in it all and love making
| visualisations about it.
|
| All that said, one of the intents behind creating the map is to
| highlight exactly this sort of stuff and to spark a discussion
| around why it might be.
| wiredfool wrote:
| 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.
| g_p wrote:
| Also another reason - a generation site may be curtailed,
| meaning that its output is restricted due to grid capacity
| limitations, and allowing it to export more energy onto the
| local power network may exceed safe operating parameters for
| the lines connecting the generation site to the grid.
|
| Therefore in high wind, you would expect that in areas of
| dense generation, especially those with limited capacity
| interconnects to the rest of the grid, curtailment may be
| seen.
| rmccue wrote:
| I could see this being the case for regional balancing, but
| presumably a 1GW generation site has a 1GW-capable link to
| the grid, otherwise that seems like overbuilt capacity?
|
| (nb of course you might overprovision it to some degree on
| the presumption that, say, only 70% of your generation is
| usable at any one time; I more mean the numbers like say
| 16%.)
| jeffwass wrote:
| This 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.
| helb wrote:
| The EU has this tool for viewing solar radiation data and
| estimating energy yields based on location & angle:
| https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html
|
| The interface isn't great, but i find it pretty useful
| sometimes.
| giarc wrote:
| 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 :)
| Symbiote wrote:
| 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.)
| harg wrote:
| Solar is pretty popular in the UK. Panels have reduced in
| cost per watt and energy bills have increased so much that it
| makes it worthwhile for many homes and businesses.
|
| We do get the occasional sunny day contrary to popular
| belief, but even on cloudy days it's possible to generate a
| decent amount of energy.
|
| We also have very long days in summer which can make for a
| decent amount of kWh/day (although the opposite is true in
| winter)
| robhawkes wrote:
| Solar isn't an area I'm that familiar with but we have no
| issues generating plenty of electricity from the sun in the
| UK.
|
| There's a great site [1] that calculates total solar
| generation around the UK using a mix of real data and
| forecasts. We were generating at 5GW around midday and that
| number will only increase.
|
| [1] https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/
| ricardo81 wrote:
| There is definitely an ROI, especially with recent prices
| (current tariffs are around 33p kWh)
|
| Then there's the likes of Ripple Energy's solar park co-op
| offering. The levelised cost of buying in is around 2.5p kWh,
| with another 2p kWh going on maintenance. The return on the
| 1st (and active) co-op agreement there via a wind farm is 28p
| kWh, no reason why the solar park would give different
| returns than the wind one. Here in the UK grid pricing is
| more or less the same nationally.
|
| Unfortunately there's much less of a return in Winter months
| due to higher latitudes, though in Summertime the days are
| longer than in many other countries.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Out of date but: https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html
|
| A ~4kW installation gives me up to ~25kWh on a good day in
| summer. The big factor is actually the precession of the
| seasons since I'm at 56 degrees north. Retail electricity
| prices are now over 30p a kWh, so anything you can do to
| offset that is very useful.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thanks! So I don't have solar data yet but I plan to first add
| aggregated solar using something like Sheffield Solar. Long
| term I plan to predict solar generation at a project/individual
| level using weather data and generation models.
|
| There's some previous work in this area by others so I imagine
| my near future will be spent digging through various papers on
| the subject.
| Telemark70 wrote:
| Please would you give a URL for Sheffield Solar.
|
| I found sheffieldsolar.co.uk but could not find any data
| within that site.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Here you go: https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| Sheffield solar are your guys. Maybe the best publicly
| available one.
| kodah wrote:
| Cool 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. I'd love to
| hear feedback if folks have experience.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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 finding a
| spot to clear some tree cover. Grab a pallet of dirt cheap used
| panels from SanTan and throw 'em out on the ground.
|
| Personally I probably wouldn't even think about wind unless I
| lived out in eastern Oregon or Washington on the plains, with
| big enough property that I could get a halfway decent size
| turbine and mount it far enough from the house so I couldn't
| hear it.
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| Very cool. I always used earth.nullschool.net to get a sense for
| global wind patterns; this uses a similar animation.
| robhawkes wrote:
| That's a classic visualisation and for sure an inspiration with
| my map! The wind data and animated wind layers are from
| WeatherLayers, which I highly recommend - great people behind
| it and very easy to set up.
|
| https://weatherlayers.com/
| zakjan wrote:
| I admit that earth.nullschool.net and other similar sites have
| pioneered the visualisation style.
|
| However, their main drawback is that they are standalone, can't
| be integrated to another application (besides an iframe).
|
| WeatherLayers is built as a tool for developers, to allow for a
| seamless integration to other applications and allow overlaying
| with custom data such as wind power plants in this case, to
| support end-users with understanding the data in natural
| context.
| pcrh wrote:
| Nice! It looks like there's a big storm in the Atlantic right
| now....
| erentz wrote:
| Does 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/
| wiredfool wrote:
| Have you seen Global Wind Atlas?
| https://globalwindatlas.info/en
| s_dev wrote:
| Windfarm generation Dashboard in Ireland and Northern Ireland:
| https://www.smartgriddashboard.com
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I'm looking to add more countries to the
| map so I'll dig into the data behind this one.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| ElectrictyMap.org uses a parsing engine to aggregate as many
| publicly available ISO/TSO/BAs to show live generation mix
| and cross border energy movement data when possible, and
| falls back to ML generated estimates otherwise.
|
| https://app.electricitymap.org/map?wind=false&solar=false
|
| https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-
| contrib/b...
|
| Beautiful project you've done, really enjoy the
| visualizations.
|
| (no association, just a fan)
| robhawkes wrote:
| This is amazing, thanks for the detail! I'll set aside some
| time to have a proper dig through the Electricity Map
| sources - looks like it will help me expand my map beyond
| GB.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Feel free to join their Slack as well, friendly folks if
| you have any questions.
| limbicsystem wrote:
| From this map you might think that the UK is currently depending
| (96.5%) on fossil fuels. But it's not quite that bad:
| https://grid.iamkate.com/
|
| The real eye-opener (for me) on the latter display is the
| emissions per kwh over all time - dropped steadily from 500g in
| (only!) 2012 to a steady 150g or so recently. Encouraging!
| robhawkes wrote:
| This is a good point - I'm not currently accounting for solar
| in the aggregate and I'm lumping everything else as "non-
| renewable" which is true but not ideal as it's not all fossil
| fuels.
|
| I'm going to look at how to be a little more accurate with
| this, similar to Kate's great website.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I think hydro and tidal power is renewable right?
| robhawkes wrote:
| Sure is! I'm limited by the way the generation is broken
| down in the source data [1] as it doesn't make any
| distinction for tidal generation - though I'd argue that's
| probably a very small amount in the UK. Hydro is already
| separated though.
|
| [1] https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type
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