UK power generation

[polygonum]

Then flood Venice when the weather is cold in order to generate enough leccie... So not very different from now!

[The Natural Philosopher]

100mbps. Its hosted on a Gigatux virtual private server in London somewhere.

that's no reason to not split it, if that's what people want.

what do you want? day/week/month/year/the lot?

I'll have to make a new page to give you the option to select..

[polygonum]

Have only recently started looking at grid watch - wondering (and it has probably already discussed!) what happens when Dinorwig is pumping rather than generating. Does that show as a negative?

[The Other Mike]

If you were operating a natioanlised industry you could do that. Private enterprises (i.e 100% of the UK power sector) are less likely to run the risk of being destroyed by Euro legislation and crippling EU court action. The only way to keep the lights on is to hold a gun to their heads... and it may come to that.

[The Other Mike]

Yes, that sort of thing that quite clearly never happens...very often

[The Other Mike]

You can expect the French and Dutch to be demanding import early afternoon, the peak times are different. Notice how quickly the reversal to import commences not long after 1500.

With between 2 and 3GW of oil available depending on how you count mothballed plant, all with plenty of hours left under the LCPD, coal plant elsewhere within the same company on limited hours, and some with oil in tanks that must be burnt before the end of March 2013, you can expect some oil burning this winter. Such usage is obviously timed for time of maximum demand because they want more money for running but oil is cheap compared to gas at the moment.

So It isn't a panic measure, ok the French and Dutch interconnectors were at around 1GW a piece, but there was still enough to permit 250MW of Irish export (although this is more a case of limiting Scotland - England cross border transfer)

The demand came in about 0.6GW below predicted with about 20GW of gas generation on the bars. That leaves somewhere around 4GW of OCGT / CCGT generation surplus that had previously being declared as of 2 days ago that could possibly have been despatched.

You may find that wholesale gas prices in Europe are the reason why less UK based CCGT/OCGT plant is generating at the moment.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Sadly no. Cant get the data.

A lot of people have recently started looking at gridwatch.

see traffic stats..I';ll be asking for money if it gets much worse..I'll bust the bandwidth.

you would be surprised at who IS looking. One access checked back to Boeing R & D..

No other country in the world has better (quasi) real time views on electrical grid generation.

I'm thinking of doing a floodwatch as well. Defra's site is..totally vile.

I'd love to also do weather and temperature..from peoples actual weather station data.

[Dave Liquorice]

Those mili bits again... B-) Wrong question from me as well though, how much total download quota has the site got?

The lot for certain. After that I think I'd only be looking at the last rolling seven days including the latest record or a specific period/day that I could dig out of a monthly file.

You could also have a start date/time and stop date/time and people could just grab the period they want. But that has implications on server CPU useage if it got popular.

Essentially static files would do me, the rolling seven day one could be variable length. ie the it simply has each new record appended until midnight then the oldest day is hacked off. The current monthly one having yesterdays data added after midnight sometime.

[The Natural Philosopher]

CPU usage is the least of my worries. RAM is more under pressure.

It may be that allowing users to create their own limits is not a serious problem. Might have to use the dreaded javascript to stop them setting silly things.

The mysql enquiry for the whole database only takes a few seconds or so.

# time dataset-dump

real 0m3.160s user 0m0.604s sys 0m0.140s

# And I might get that down with some indics..

its easier to simply select a fixed number of records.. But all things are possible..

I'll have a think.

[Java Jive]

Nukes can't be relied upon long-term, because in this country we have zilch supplies of the fuel, of which there are expected to be some shortages within about 10-15 years.

[The Natural Philosopher]

we have 10-15 years of stockpiled plutonium already, and lord knows how much enrichable depleted uranium.

Actually that is exactly what the pro nuclear people do not do. Its exactly the reverse: the numbers don't stack up for anything else.

... but if you just want to understand why the idea is illusory that

Who completely ignores thorium and breeder technology, development of new reserves and reprocessed MOX fuel.

In short he is talking bollocks.

Its less a question of being pro-nuclear than accepting that nothing else will do the job.

Certainly not renewable energy

> Build a few nukes FFS and stop desecrating the country with wind turbines.

[The Natural Philosopher]

>>> ... but if you just want to understand why the idea is illusory that

>>>>

And I forgot to mention fusion. Fission need only last maybe 100 years.

The real point is that our society cannot survive on renewable energy alone - it needs the gas - its the only sensible way to co-operate with the renewables.,

So renewable energy is no alternative to gas at all - worse, it tries us absolutely to gas.

But I am delighted that e.g. Germany has dumped its nukes. More uranium for us!

Let them destroy themselves chasing an impossible dream. Save us the trouble of invading them all over again like the last time they chased an impossible dream. Arrogant patronising shitheads.

[Ian]

Yep, that's perfect!

Thanks,

[Chris J Dixon]

xcweather.co.uk does quite a good job with current data from official sources.

Chris.

[Dave Liquorice]

tens of kbps? Quota might be a problem, eventually. B-)

But you don't know if that is just one person in their T break or a real use being made of the data. My weather station site gets hits from the Met Office...

Data from the river guages? There are *a lot* of those.

Already been done by at least two sites, WeatherUnderground, WeatherOnline. The biggest snag is that the exposure of the instruments is very variable, mine are "OK" but do suffer from poor exposure.

[The Other Mike]

Why not? Can't you just call the following url that returns a csv with the interconnector transfer for each half hour for the past month?

[The Other Mike]

generation switches exclusively to nukes and we then we all run out of fuel despite us having huge stockpiles of perfectly recyclable and recoverable material here in the UK and easy access to huge amounts of the raw material in our former empire.

I really couldn't give a rats arse if the lights go out in some other country because they are overrun with hippies who think the answer is wind turbines. But I have huge concerns about the lights being kept on in the UK by us paying money to KGB thugs like Putin.

[Mark]

The tories shouldn't have campaigned so strongly against AV. LOL.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Any generating system which relies on imported fuel is *not* going to save the country.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It's not so long ago we had that amount - and more - of gas and oil.