OT - Gridwatch - coal giving its all?

[The Other Mike]

Ferrybridge C still had huge coal stocks when it closed (March 2016) as it ran at lower load factors than expected in the winter of 2015/16 and had less output capability because one of the two units with flue gas desulphurisation was placed permanently out of action in 2014.

The rerouted A1M now passes the other side of the station to the original A1 and you can easily see the coal storage area. They still light it for some unknown reason.

Some coal stocks were still there in Autumn 2017 the last time I passed by some

18 months after it last generated. Most if not all was transferred by rail to Fiddlers Ferry which like Ferrybridge C is owned by SSE.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thanks for that mike

[tony sayer]

In article , The Other Mike scribeth thus

Is there a similar site for the Gas supply I've often wondered?...

[Vir Campestris]

I kind of like the Smiths dials... but then I'm old fashioned (too).

BTW Coal is resting on the stop ATM, in excess of 10GW.

Andy

[Chris Hogg]

As someone pointed out a few years ago, the use of Smiths dials is particularly appropriate, but at the time I didn't appreciate the comment.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes...Should I make the scale bigger? Of such crucial descions is life made...:-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think this evening may well see some records broken on electricity production. Already serious amounts of OCGT have been fired up, and we seem to be exporting to France and ireland.

CCGT is now showing respectable levels too.

PS. The dials (joking apart) were an attempt to generate the ambience of a MG midget/AH sprite black crackle dashboard.

[The Other Mike]

Not 'public' as far as I know for the gas entry capacity but there are sources elsewhere for what volumes the LNG terminals and the pipe to Norway can handle.

There is this, which is the equivalent of the bmreports

Real time flows into the gas transmission system refeshed every 2 mins, forecast today demand and previous day actual demand, forecast demands 3,4 and 5 days ahead and storage / import volumes.

Lots of descriptive text here for the various options

[The Other Mike]

For this winter peak yes at 51GW, which is some 1.4GW above the previous peak in December, but even then it is 10GW below where we were a decade ago

If the 51GW is the peak then that is a mere 300MW above the peak predicted in the Winter Outlook report published back at the end of October.

Despite all that there is still (at 8 hours out) over 8.8GW of predicted margin for 6pm

Plus with today almost certainly a triad day much will be done to reduce demand across the transmission system / distribution system boundaries to lower use of system charges.

[David]

The dial should really go up to 11. :-)

Showing 11.2 at the moment.

Cheers

Dave R

[The Natural Philosopher]

Sigh. Perhaps I'll adjust that to 12 after a cuppa..

[David]

Love the site :-)

One thing would make it easier for me to understand; if the daily/weekly/ monthly graphics could pop up a seriously enlarged display if you click on them. I do have trouble reading the fine detail. Also the smaller dials.

However I have absolutely no idea how easy that would be to implement.

The zoom function on the browser helps, of course, just kinda wishing. :-)

Interesting that we seem to be importing from the Dutch and then exporting to France and Ireland.

Cheers

Dave R

[The Natural Philosopher]

Should see what is going down in France...massive imports from Germany. Presumably more coal..

[The Natural Philosopher]

The graphs are probably the hardest bit of coding I had to do.

It would be seriously difficult to make bigger ones...I would have to start almost from scratch.

mouseover enlarged dials, not so much.

[Andy Burns]

Did you look at using RRDtool?

[David]

Self modifying code which recalibrates to last known high reading?

Then again, enjoy your cuppa and enjoy the snow.

Nobody died.

Cheers

Dave R

[David]

Grateful for any crumbs which fall from your table. :-)

Cheers

Dave R

[The Natural Philosopher]

No. I did think of MRTG which is an earlier version of RRD...the touble is that by the time you have written the ugly shims to interface with someone elses smartness - and I have high regard for Oetiker as a coder

- you might as well have written your own version.

On these smaller projects time taken to learn the toolset usually exceeds time coding the app anyway.

I used fixed scale small graphs oroginally as well because of te transmission time for larger ones...that was all about ruinning ity initially ion a home broadband link.

Now with a lot more bandwidth it could be possible to download much larger graphs (2:1 or 3:1 might work well - and scale them in the browser...

I'll think that over anyway

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well i fixed it befire the cuppa anyway, because I have a tool for making new dials very quickly.

And the snow has melted anyway.

I bet someone did

[Chris Hogg]

Hold down Ctrl and press + repeatedly until you get the size you want.