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Show HN: An interactive map showing live wind farm generation in Great Britain

245 pointsby robhawkesabout 2 years ago
GB Renewables Map an energy experiment created entirely in my free time (day job is visualisation at Octopus Energy).<p>It&#x27;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.<p>Animated weather data is from WeatherLayers and shows current and historic wind conditions on the map, providing context to wind generation around the country.<p>History mode allows you to go back in time and see wind generation and weather conditions for a particular date and time. It&#x27;s great for exploring days of record generation, such as the 21.6GW record on January 10th, 2023!<p>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?<p>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 &quot;sparkle&quot; button on the map you&#x27;ll get to see what the upcoming 3.6GW Dogger Bank wind farm is estimated to generate if it was operational today.<p>There&#x27;s an &quot;About&quot; 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&#x27;re curious.<p>This is just the start and there are many more features to come!<p>Please let me know your comments and suggestions.

21 comments

zakjanabout 2 years ago
I&#x27;m here to answer for WeatherLayers, AMA! I&#x27;m super happy to help @robhawkes with this project.<p>WeatherLayers consists of two products, that can be used either together or separately:<p>- 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.<p>- WeatherLayers Cloud is a cloud service providing pre-processed data for visualization from common public weather data sources (NOAA, Copernicus).<p>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.
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bb123about 2 years ago
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&#x2F;min to just instant Watts? kWh&#x2F;day makes sense on larger time scales but Wh&#x2F;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.
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limbicsystemabout 2 years ago
From this map you might think that the UK is currently depending (96.5%) on fossil fuels. But it&#x27;s not quite that bad: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grid.iamkate.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grid.iamkate.com&#x2F;</a><p>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!
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bulletsvshumansabout 2 years ago
Really illustrates the potential benefits of offshore wind farms. It seems like there&#x27;s a large overall difference between wind speeds on the land and in the water, especially far off coast.
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helbabout 2 years ago
I&#x27;m afraid we killed it… I see just a gray base map and the browser is getting a &quot;504 Gateway timeout&quot; from the API:<p><pre><code> This Serverless Function has timed out. Your connection is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly. 504: GATEWAY_TIMEOUT Code: FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT</code></pre>
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ourlordcaffeineabout 2 years ago
Just wanted to say, as someone who works in the industry, wind FPNs are sometimes incorrect.<p>Grid have access to &quot;power available&quot; signals, but this is not public data.
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jeffwassabout 2 years ago
This is cool Robin!<p>Do you also have access to solar data? Eg, I am a UK homeowner w&#x2F; a recent solar installation on my roof, would be curious to see how that looks too.
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FredPretabout 2 years ago
Very cool. I always used earth.nullschool.net to get a sense for global wind patterns; this uses a similar animation.
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insaiderabout 2 years ago
Nice! I worked on a similar project in Ireland - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ux-design-awards.com&#x2F;winners&#x2F;2022-1-376-rtv-esb-generation-trading-real-time-visualisation-application" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ux-design-awards.com&#x2F;winners&#x2F;2022-1-376-rtv-esb-...</a>
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jveabout 2 years ago
I&#x27;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?
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kodahabout 2 years ago
Cool to see windfarm discussion here. I live in the PNW, love where I live but I have a <i>ton</i> 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&#x27;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&#x27;m in the domain of a blind investment. I&#x27;d love to hear feedback if folks have experience.
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s_devabout 2 years ago
Windfarm generation Dashboard in Ireland and Northern Ireland: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartgriddashboard.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smartgriddashboard.com</a>
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flirabout 2 years ago
Suggestion: when I click on a windfarm&#x27;s name, instead of removing all the other windfarms from the map, it should leave them but highlight the selected windfarm in some way.
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erentzabout 2 years ago
Does anyone know of a good tool for modeling wind potential?<p>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&#x27;re built.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pvwatts.nrel.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pvwatts.nrel.gov&#x2F;</a>
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rmccueabout 2 years ago
Interesting to see where wind farms look like they&#x27;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.<p>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>(p.s. thanks for your work at Octopus!)
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jacquesmabout 2 years ago
Beautiful work. We&#x27;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.
gghhzzgghhzzabout 2 years ago
It&#x27;s very nice visualisation.<p>The only comment I have is that concentric circles are not the most intuitive way of showing a percentage of a whole. 50% doesn&#x27;t &#x27;look&#x27; like 50%, and looks similar to 30%.<p>but I&#x27;m not sure how else you would do it.
sasquatch2000about 2 years ago
Very cool stuff! I love how you can see visually the impact they make when it&#x27;s windy. (I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ve seen something else (none map vis. though) with stuff like grid batteries and gas ones but I have no idea where if that helps?)
sdflhasjdabout 2 years ago
How come dogger bank is sat out there where there looks to be plenty of wind, but generating zero?
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plopzabout 2 years ago
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?
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amerf1about 2 years ago
Very exciting project, from a fellow ex-woodmacker. Will get in touch
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