29th April 2019
“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.” – Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia
Before the installation of wind and solar farms, the UK electricity grid was made up of a largely unchanging mix of sources. The sources that produced our electricity changed little day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month. For example, in 2006, coal reliably provided 37% of electricity, gas 36%, nuclear 18%, and just over 2% was renewables (hydro, wind, and solar).
With the introduction of renewables, we’re now looking at a wholly different picture. In 2018 the UK energy mix was: 39% gas, 21% renewables, 18% nuclear and 6% coal. But these are only the average over the year. The intermittent nature of renewables means that the electricity grid has become far more dynamic. For example, as storms roll in wind power can soar to 35% of total UK electricity supply and on the sunniest of days solar can top 20%. A range of sites have popped up enabling you to monitor these constant fluctuations. Bored on the train? Stuck for a conversation topic? Whip out your phone and dazzle people with the information contained in one of the sites below. Drench them with data about something they did not know they could be drenched in…
Electric Insights was setup by Drax plc, who own and run a large power station in East Yorkshire, England. This power station was once the largest coal fired power station in the UK, and one of the the largest emitters of CO2 in Europe.
However, seeing this business model as unsustainable, in 2010 they started burning biomass instead. In 2016, as a part of this exercise in greenification, they released Electric Insights “to help inform and enlighten the debate on Britain’s electricity”.
Drax plc are very open about the methodology and analysis on the site. The data is sourced from the National Grid, Elexon (wholesale electricity market operator) and Sheffield Solar (who estimate the solar power output). Dr Iain Staffell, Lecturer in Sustainable Energy at Imperial College London, designed the methodology, data presentation and writes the quarterly reports which appear on the site.
The data is presented clearly and enables you to scroll through 24 hour, 7 day, month or year long periods with ease. In addition, the sidebar controls are easy to navigate and allows you to select/deselect various features.
The UK’s National Grid started carbonintensity.org in 2018 as a way of give live updates on the amount of carbon being emitted by the UK’s electricity grid. They quote a value of carbon emitted per unit of electricity (grams of CO2 per kWh – gCO2eq/kWh). The higher this value the higher the carbon intensity.
This website breakdowns carbon intensity of different regions of the UK, as well as the energy mix in each of these regions. This means you can see more clearly exactly where your energy is coming from. For example, a higher proportion of the energy in north Scotland comes from wind and hydro, whereas in the South East the electricity is mainly supplied from gas, wind, or imported via undersea cables from mainland Europe.
The other clever feature of this website is that it can predict carbon intensity of the UK the next 48 hours. The hope is that consumers and companies can use this data to plan to switch on electrical devices when the carbon intensity is low.
The Crown Estate is the organisation which manages the Queen’s portfolio of property. This includes the seabed around the UK, which the Queen owns in its entirety, and means that if you want to build an offshore wind turbine you need to get permission from the Queen (via the Crown Estate; home visits are not encouraged).
In the interests of transparency the Crown Estate website has lots of information about what the Queen owns and what is being done with it. This includes all the wind offshore wind farms, the seabed under which developers have to lease from the Crown Estate.
This website features a neat map showing the live output of all the offshore wind farms in UK waters. It gives the output of each individual wind farm as a percentage of its maximum potential output. Therefore you can see which wind farms are providing the bulk of the total wind farm output at any given time.
Not content with just the UK’s electricity grid? Well I give you the world! Or at least a subsection of the world who freely give up their electricity grid data.
Ever wondered where the French get their energy? Nuclear. Iraq? Oil and gas. The Indian State of Karnataka? Coal with an increasing amounts of solar, wind and hydro. Not all the world is covered and there is a particular focus on Europe, parts of the US, South America and Australia, but new countries are being added all the time.
The map also displays the amount of CO2 being released into the atmosphere per unit of electricity (grams of CO2 per kWh – gCO2eq/kWh), and the website colour codes the country/area accordingly. Green being the greenest and black the dirtiest.
The chromatic ranking system really highlights the differences between countries. France, Scandinavia, and Ontario, Canada, do particularly well, with consistently low emissions (<100gCO2eq/kWh), whereas Estonia and Eastern Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland) regularly emit more than <700gCO2eq/kWh.
Other standout features of this site are the overlays. By clicking the wind or solar buttons on the right of the screen you can overlay live solar intensity or (our favourite) live wind speed across the whole world!