OT Nuclear power providing 6x more electricity than wind.

[philipuk]

Thought I would just throw that out there considering it's getting colder now and there are still many nuke sites down for various reasons...

No surprise though.

Philip

[Brian Gaff]

No no surprise and the stuff we import from France is much higher in Nuclear content.

If they keep hanging on for Fusion, it will never happen.

Brian

[Bill Wright]

When I feed the chickens I have a view of ten turbines. As the ladies cluster round me in anticipation of a treat I stand and stare. All the windmills were stationary at 12.30pm. Gridwatch was showing a total national output of about 1GW.

Bill

[Dave Liquorice]

And only 5.5 GW of nuke on the grid, about 3 GW below its capacity. Offline are Sizewell B (both sets), Heysham 1 (both sets), Hartlepool (both sets) and ones set at Dungeness B.

I see we are already (at 1730) leaning on the gas again at 21 GW, coal at 14.5 GW (as it's been all day since about 0800). Hydro has come up about .3 GW in the last hour and pumped is on an almost vertical rise... Wind 1.5 GW.

Demand 48.9 GW.

[Tim Watts]

I remember it hitting more or less 65GW 2 years (or might have been 3) ago. We don't even have that now...

Where's all the coal gone? Or has TNP not adjusted the dial-max for the closure of various plant?

[Andy Burns]

A few days ago I downloaded a full copy of the gridwatch data

a) It'd be a shame to lose 3+ years of data if "anything bad" happens b) To look at trends and correlations in the data.

After filtering out a handful of anomalous readings, the max(demand) was

59.2GW on the evening of 8th Feb 2012

[Tim Watts]

OK - I must have imagined it - unless I saw an anomalous reading... Odd, sure I recall it being over 60 at one point. Perhaps it was more like

5-6 years ago? Maybe that time when Sizewell B fell over and the SE was threatened with demand control.

[Chris Hogg]

Gridwatch is on the Templar web site. But is that something of TNP's own making, a private or public company, or what, and if TNP were to become incapacitated in some way, would Gridwatch continue to function and be maintained by anyone?

[dennis]

I would imagine its a load of python written by TNP. The data is pulled of another site in XML format.

[Dave Liquorice]

happens

Hum you have a point. Though the last time I downloaded the full set gave my copy of excel a "headache"...

max(demand)

Suprised it's that high, though 55+ GW is quite common for the evening winter peak.

If you are thinking of Longannet followed by Sizewell B that was mid morning 27th May 2008 and 1.5 GW of capacity disappeared. Places did get cut off as the automatics tried to keep the frequency up.

Well worth the read, particulary towards the end. Remember this was written 6 (six) years ago ...

IIRC we just had a few seconds of brown out.

[Andy Burns]

Yes, it says so on the "about" page

That's his old/ex/dormant/whatever company.

He provided the capability to export the data, and made the source available too, so I've grabbed those (not the french data though) and would get it up and running under a different domain, if required.

It goes without saying, I hope it doesn't come to that and he's just gone south for the Winter or something :-)

[Andy Burns]

I think I tried it in libreoffice an it didn't like it much either,

I'm temporarily using "DB Browser for SQLite" which is actually fairly handy for a "slim" database GUI, but I'll probably whack it into postgreSQL anyway ...

[Andy Burns]

Not likely, most of the anomolies are over 100GW

Only one ~66GW reading this year, the preceding 5 mins was 31GW and the following 5 mins was 122GW, so looks like some double and quad counting going on!

You could look at the historic triad periods ...

[Chris French]

Possibly earlier that the data set? I don't remember 2011-12 winter as being particularly cold overall. Mild to start with coldest in early Feb I think.

2010-11 came in very cold, from mid/end of november. I remember being away for a week end nov - beginning dec and coming back to a big ice stalagmite on the drive from a dripping loft cistern overflow. ISTR the cold weather continuing through december and into Jan.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the peak then was a bit higher.

Hmm, Furtling about ob the web gives me 'In Great Britain the highest ever load met was 60,118 MW on 10 December 2002.'

From:

[Chris Hogg]

Good news. If all else fails, people can access the basic numbers on the bmreports site

here . But not a patch on TNP's Gridwatch presentation. Note that there's masses more info on this page; just tick any of the boxes on the LHS of that page to see more.

Amen to that!

[Chris Hogg]

Just to add, some French data is available here:

and scroll down. You may have to change the date to current, but moving the pointer across the cumulative graph changes the numbers in the table below, giving the generated output by type at any particular time of day, although not in quite as much detail as Gridwatch France.

As I've only just discovered this, there may be better displays within the rte-France site. Play with the coloured buttons at the top of the page to find more detail or different info, perhaps.

[Chris Hogg]

And Germany

Move pointer across graph to see table of amounts from each category of power source at any point. Click on Stacked for absolute amounts, and Expanded to see percentages. Nuclear still 15 - 20% of total, I see. Usage tips tell you how to get totally confused!