New gridwatch

What we really need is a button to make all the wind farms and solar panels go away :-)

Another Dave

I don't understand that.. the site doesn't redirect to anywhere. Its totally self contained.

You CAN get a zero meter moment if BMreports fails to respond with data, which sometimes it does.

Works for me with FF 8.0

:-)

Oddly enough, that is a winter project.

To take the data and do 'what if' runs on it, to see what variations in fuel mix would do to the price of electricity and make a rough stab at calculating carbon reduction as well.

One extremely worrying trend I have seen over the last 10 days or so while N Europe has been becalmed below a massive high, is that we have fired up the coal to within an inch of its capacity (23GW), and have even been bringing some OCGT kit into play, in order to max out the cross channel links and supply 3GW to Europe.

Short dark days with no wind make a mockery of renewable energy. As does keeping half Germany's nuclear fleet off. WE are burning COAL because Germany has too many windmills.

If we get a super cold still winter, with luck Germany will black out

They deserve it.

The graph never shows a -ve figure for the pumped storage, is that what the data you're using shows, or the way you're displaying it?

We need London to black out for a few hours. The almost-load-shedding scare a few years ago was a wake up call, but some of our politicians are a bit deaf.

sadly, that is what the data shows.

EVERYONE would like to know.. when its pumping...and by how much.

I suppose it juts gets added to aggregate demand.

Likewise I have no figures for embedded generation of solar PV or wind - stuff that relies (trustingly) on the users own metering to get the rip off certificates (ROCs) and the FITS.

The wind figures are from the big industrial scale windfarms.

If you click on the BMreports word you will see where the data comes from - I CURL the relevant files and strip out the data from there. The dump it in a database.

That is used to form the graphs.

The same process happens with the dials - a real time C program is invoked by the PHP to get the data, by stripping the same site. This info is dumped in a file, and if the file is less than 5 minutes old, the file data is used instead of a live strip. That reduces load on the BMreports site to one access every 5 mins for the dials, and one every 5 mins for the database.

If I cant reach, or get bad data, from the bmreports site, the database collector simply assumes the data is what it was 5 minutes ago. There area few instances of that in the data.

The dials however, are likely to go to zero, or the whole server will lock up...if the data doesn't come back in a reasonable time.

That's an area I am still tuning.

A key for all the abbreviations would be nice.

Tim

Maybe displaying few significant digits too, I don't really need to know down to the 0.001 of a GW, switch units down to MW as appropriate (or kW for PV!)

write one? I'll add it..

I assume you mean fewer..

trouble is that's a bit COMPLEX as I use a fixed routine for a given dial size.

you DO need to know it the OCGT goes to e.g. 0.040GW because that shows you that someone somewhere in national grid central has got sufficiently alarmed to ask for power from some of the crappiest and most expensive kit we have..lord help us if the 'other' dial ever flicks off zero.

Solar PV contributes nothing measurable to the grid anyway.

Its all part of the ongoing green fantasy.

Yes, didn't seem worth posting a correction

Fair enough if it complicates it, just saying that the nearest .1GW would probably be sufficient, if it was easy.

But it would be easier to read as 40MW

sigh. Another three hours of my life gone then :-)

Heh!

What is the meaning of the orange/red segments at the zero end of the dials? I'd expect them to be at the maximum capacity end ...

I think if you try and reload anything on the same page it also gets picky, but I can't be sure. Used to be a useful security feature, but now counter productive. Turned it off in the advanced settings and now the site works O.K. Ah, progress......

Now you have me slightly confused, because I can't find Germany on the display anywhere. Is this a deduction from the fact that we are exporting to the French/Dutch?

I assume that the graphs on the RHS go negative when we export and positive when we import? Or is it vice versa? And the Irish don't seem to be participating. Whatever, cool site :-)

Have they given their blessing to gridwatch?

Anyone who gets their energy from SPARKNRG (I could guess this might equate to sparkenergy.co.uk) might be interested in this

ah well...that is a sign that output from a given class is dangerously LOW.

Sadly the nuclear power output has been falling ever since I started monitoring. Tat may be warm sea water, or it may be units down for refuelling. We SHOULD have better than 8GW of functional nuclear.

It's working in FF8 for me.