[HN Gopher] GB Renewables Map
___________________________________________________________________
GB Renewables Map
Author : RobinL
Score : 120 points
Date : 2026-02-05 12:48 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (renewables-map.robinhawkes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (renewables-map.robinhawkes.com)
| joelccr wrote:
| It's pretty windy here today! Around half of the UK's generation
| is currently coming from wind[1]
|
| [1] https://grid.iamkate.com/
| cjrp wrote:
| > New wind power records are set regularly, and between 5:30pm
| and 6:00pm on 5th December 2025 British wind farms averaged a
| record 23.94GW of generation.
|
| Cool!
| robhawkes wrote:
| Semi-related: I also have a page where you can track the wind
| records as they happen
|
| https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/records
| AliCollins wrote:
| Great visualisation...but doesn't seem to have any display of the
| amount of Solar (though won't be much on such a cloudy day!)
| robhawkes wrote:
| Some solar power assets are being tracked though unfortunately
| (for now) I'm only able to display data for assets that report
| on the balancing system in Great Britain. This means most solar
| has no data that I can easily access.
|
| I hope to work around this soon.
| parkersweb wrote:
| This has just had a major update to include other renewables (eg
| hydro, solar) as well as non-renewable energy sources (gas).
|
| It's also added grid boundaries and cabling recently - and I
| think there's also wind roses planned?
|
| My one UI wish - the energy sources filters are currently
| displayed as options on the map - rather than controls for the
| entire UI - which meant I missed them entirely at first. Would be
| great if they could be given more prominence.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Definitely wind roses planned, I posted about them on my
| LinkedIn page if anyone is curious (linked on the main map).
|
| That's a great point about the controls. Originally the map
| only showed wind farms and as I've expanded the features the
| control system (and really the entire UX) hasn't kept up. I
| need to sit down and have a proper think about how best to
| design the controls and documentation.
| addedlovely wrote:
| FAQ also mentions it's only wind, so took me a while to
| notice :)
|
| Would be nice to have a definition of 'Turn-up' and
| 'Curtailment' in that FAQ for us non grid savvy visitors.
|
| Works great though, well done.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Ah yeah the FAQ is very out of date and in need of a full
| rewrite. I'll get to that eventually. And you're right,
| I'll make sure to add some sort of glossary and perhaps
| also explain things better in-situ.
| roldie wrote:
| Great work, this is so cool to see!
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thank you
| martinald wrote:
| Hey Robin, big fan of this map, congrats on getting front page on
| HN :).
|
| Two suggestions/questions if you may:
|
| 1) Would be good to see how many MW each boundary can handle, not
| just %? Btw, I can't see the number for the south east england
| boundary.
|
| 2) Great job on the battery info. I'm seeing some battery storage
| is curtailed. How is that possible? Please don't tell me that we
| are paying batteries to _not_ export :/?
| robhawkes wrote:
| Hey! And thank you
|
| 1) Absolutely agree. The current approach for the boundaries is
| a quick hack until I can implement something more
| sophisticated. Safe to say an update is already in the works
| that adds a MW value and more insight into the state of each
| boundary (and is also more accurate in general)
|
| 2) "Please don't tell me that we are paying batteries to _not_
| export" - it's actually the opposite, the batteries paid to not
| export (at least today). You can dig into this yourself via the
| Detailed System Prices dataset [0] and looking at one of the
| batteries on the sell stack (eg. KILSB-5)
|
| [0] https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/detailed-system-prices
| pjc50 wrote:
| > "Please don't tell me that we are paying batteries to _not_
| export" - it's actually the opposite, the batteries paid to
| not export (at least today).
|
| Unfortunately you've got at least one negative wrong in this
| sentence and I'm still confused, and the linked dataset is
| currently blank?
|
| Sorry for complaining, this is a great website!
| robhawkes wrote:
| No worries. The Detailed System Prices dataset is lagged by
| a couple hours so try going back in time.
|
| The simplest answer I can give is that assets place bids
| and a volume of energy that they are willing to turn down
| if the system operator needs to. Those bids are either
| positive or negative in value and this depends a lot on the
| type of asset, for example wind assets usually bid negative
| (ie. we pay them to turn down) while gas assets usually bid
| positive (ie. they pay us to turn down). The reason for
| that is a lot to do with complexities of the market and
| also the cost of running that assets, the cost of fuels,
| etc.
| martinald wrote:
| Ok, got it I think.
|
| So actually the battery operator is paying _the grid_ to
| turn down output from whatever was previously agreed
| (because they think they'd get more money for it later?).
|
| And this shows as curtailment on the map?
|
| Let me know if I'm directionally right here. If I am, it
| would be good to see 'bad curtailment' vs 'good
| curtailment' (i assume if bids are negative/positive?)
| wooger wrote:
| Can someone explain what the lines mean?
| robhawkes wrote:
| The squiggly ones across the country? Those are the National
| Energy System Operator (NESO) transmission boundaries for Great
| Britain. They represent areas of the country that are tracked
| for the purposes of managing constraints, which is when the
| transmission network over the boundary can't handle the amount
| of power flowing over it. When they are overloaded (or rather,
| before that happens) NESO will step in and "balance" the
| various zones by turning up or down generators.
| arethuza wrote:
| I note that one of those lines seems to take a big detour up
| and round Cruachan?
|
| https://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/
| robhawkes wrote:
| The lines are sort of arbitrary in a geographic sense as in
| reality they are defined based on the intersection with the
| schematic version of the transmission network [0]. Though
| yeah, that specific example is an odd one and I'd be
| interested to understand more about why it was placed in
| one boundary and not the other.
|
| [0] https://www.neso.energy/data-portal/day-ahead-
| constraint-flo...
| albumen wrote:
| Lovely site. As a wind energy ignoramus, it would be
| great to add descriptions to your FAQ for the red lines,
| and curtailment.
| robhawkes wrote:
| I'll make sure to get the about page updated soon, it's
| been a bit neglected with being so focussed on the recent
| upgrades. Definitely a lot I can explain better, and also
| ways that I can solve that with better UX in general.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Oh wow, I made this! I didn't expect to see my map on here
|
| Let me know if you have any questions or feedback and I'll do my
| best to respond to them.
| ksec wrote:
| Tech Stack used? Any specific non-technical difficulty getting
| this done ?
| robhawkes wrote:
| Tech stack is a mix of things, but the big-ticket items:
|
| - Dagster for data pipeline
|
| - Parquet files for data format
|
| - Cloudflare R2 for data storage
|
| - DuckDB for data processing
|
| - NodeJS for API
|
| - NextJS + React for the app
|
| - MapLibre for the base map functionality
|
| - Deck.gl for the complex map layer (eg. wind particles)
|
| - WeatherLayers (+ GFS) for the wind particles
|
| - Cloudflare as a caching layer
|
| The main difficulty was learning about the underlying data
| and industry nuances. I've been working on this map the past
| few years and I'm still learning new things that force me to
| change my approach. It's an incredibly complex domain and
| it's part of the reason I made this, to try and make this
| complex data a bit more digestible.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's a beautiful piece of work, thank you very much.
|
| It would be amazing if this was extensible and wind farms
| and solar farms outside of GB could contribute their data
| as well.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thanks! I would love to make this something that works
| beyond GB though right now that would require a
| fundamental change to the way things are set up. It's on
| my list though, so one day.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I do some volunteer work with the
| https://electricitymaps.com/ folks, highly recommend
| getting in touch if their API(s) would be of use. I can
| provide a contact if needed.
| RobinL wrote:
| Love this! Would be super interested in any details the author
| could share on the data engineering needed to make this work. The
| vis is super impressive but I suspect the data is the harder
| thing to get working.
| robhawkes wrote:
| The most time and energy has been getting my head around the
| source data [0] and industry-specific nuances.
|
| In terms of stack I have a self-hosted Dagster [1] data
| pipeline that periodically dumps the data onto Cloudflare R2 as
| parquet files. I then have a self-hosted NodeJS API that uses
| DuckDB to crunch the raw data and output everything you see on
| the map.
|
| [0] Mostly from https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/ [1]
| https://dagster.io/
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Very well done, beautiful data communication.
| robhawkes wrote:
| Yup! I have two ways to do it right now, the first is to click
| the plug-looking button on the map and this'll switch into
| curtailment mode to filter the assets that are currently being
| turned down due to transmission constraints, as well as the
| assets being turned-up elsewhere to balance things out. Also if
| you click on a curtailed assets you'll see the curtailment as a
| yellow area on the charts.
|
| The other method is to visit my dedicated page [0] for tracking
| aggregate curtailment and turn-up, plus the costs for this.
|
| [0] https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/curtailment
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Thanks for answering my curtailment question! I removed it
| from my comment as I commented before I found the data in
| your UX, but the extra context is useful. So much
| curtailment, much more transmission and battery storage
| required.
| bitdivision wrote:
| What are the black dots around the map when you zoom in? For
| instance South-East Wales / Bristol, I see a few black dots that
| look like they cover shaded areas or something. They also show up
| at the sites for wind farms, possibly they're the turbines
| themselves?
| robhawkes wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://openinframap.org/
| bitdivision wrote:
| Very cool. Thanks
| donalhunt wrote:
| Nice job dodging the awkwardness of whether to include Ireland,
| Northern Ireland, etc (IE and NI operate as a single, all-island
| wholesale electricity market). :)
| robhawkes wrote:
| 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).
| addedlovely wrote:
| Just noticed the wind farms even have the individual units ( I
| assume ) and their interconnections mapped?!
|
| Would show that off and zoom into them when selecting them from
| the list view!
| robhawkes wrote:
| 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.
| edwardmarriner wrote:
| This is really great. It's fab to see this data being presented
| so clearly.
|
| Been following your projects and writing since the Mozilla days,
| always impressed!
| robhawkes wrote:
| Oh wow that's a blast from the past, feels like a lifetime ago!
| And thank you.
| fix4fun wrote:
| Really nice project :)
| robhawkes wrote:
| Thanks!
| somalihoaxes wrote:
| "rEnEwAbLeS"
|
| Like the composites or even asbestos in wind turbine blades?
| bluerooibos wrote:
| Do you approach coal power stations or oil rigs with the same
| level of scrutiny? I'll wait to hear back from you on the long
| list of environmental damage they cause. In your own time.
| sh1mmer wrote:
| Are those gas plants not peakers? It seems wild to me there is
| 5gw of curtailment while there is 16gw of gas going. Surely the
| grid could use some more storage capacity.
| appointment wrote:
| The curtailed windfarms are in the north of Scotland. There is
| currently not enough transmission capacity to export
| electricity from there to the south of England where the demand
| is highest. New transmission lines are under construction, but
| they wont be ready until 2029.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-05 23:01 UTC)