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.
(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?
Love your stuff Robin. The graphs and wind turbine model are particular favourites
How can we fix the curtailment problem? Storage nearer the turbines or just more transmission capacity generally? I presume we'd saturate storage pretty quickly so is it just a case of running more grid wiring from Scotland to say.. Manchester?
Great website! It would be even more great if it compared total wind generation with total UK power usage for the same time period (with a % for wind power usage).
Not to steal from Robin's excellent work, you can see how much it's been (low carbon/renewables generation) over the last twelve months at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/GB/12mo/monthly (~56% renewables, ~73% low carbon)
(Robin, if there is a way to see this on your site, I could not find it, my apologies!)
In Ireland, we’re running at about 75% renewables for the day, with most of that being wind. The absolute numbers are smaller, but that’s a peak of about 500 MW of solar and 3.6GW of wind, against something like 5-6Gw of demand.
33 comments
Seems to be another one of those sensible ideas that needs a global crisis to be pushed through to reality.
What are the lines that cross Scotland ? At time of writing they are red where as other lines further south are green.
I know of some on shore wind up near the Rochdale area too. Does it mean they are offline if they just appear as black dots on the map?
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?
How can we fix the curtailment problem? Storage nearer the turbines or just more transmission capacity generally? I presume we'd saturate storage pretty quickly so is it just a case of running more grid wiring from Scotland to say.. Manchester?
https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...
(Robin, if there is a way to see this on your site, I could not find it, my apologies!)