Open Infra Map; shows major electrical lines, power plants, gas & oil lines, and telecom/data centers. Gets its data from Open Street Map: https://openinframap.org/
For railways, there is a genre of "track diagrams" which are more like circuit diagrams for the railway, showing lines, crossovers, platforms, etc. The best ones for the UK are perhaps the Quail maps, which include all sorts of gory details, but are commercial:
Open Infra Map is just the kind of thing I was hoping for! I'm interested/surprised at how many megawatt batteries there are in the UK, and how many 10MW+ solar farms and at all the names of the offshore wind farms and where they connect back to.
True, unfortunately lightning maps doesn't seem to be accurate - at least I had 0 luck with it.
On the other hands flightradar24 and similar are so fascinating if you are on a busy plane route. The observation time is so perfect to speculate over the plane and destinations, chat about interesting facts or recent developments at destinations.
A few years ago I visited a small village where a relative of mine lives and happen to show a kid the app. Next year, I heard that the all the kids there made it a hobby to do plane spotting.
I agree. And I'm glad you put quotes around live. Much of the data for the US is estimated, not actually sourced from the grid operator. It'll be great when we have realtime data everywhere.
I wonder if this might be misleading. A lot of Los Angeles’ (LADWP) electricity has traditionally been generated generated by coal-fired plants in other states. I’d have to dig into more recent sources to see if that’s still the case, and whether that’s reflected in this dataset.
(Edit: read the sources list, and that should be reflected, but the map is not displaying heavy imports to SoCal. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d suspect LADWP obscuring sources in the published data).
Been a few years so things may have changed. But California no longer has long term contracts with coal fired plants. But probably is buying it on the spot market. With California it's natural gas -> solar -> everything else.
That’s interesting yeah like a tonne of Quebec hydro gets sold to New England it might or might not get counted
But I also can’t tell where the data is coming from why are so many Canadian provinces gray? I’m sure the website had citations somewhere but it was pretty slow in mobile safari so I didn’t bother to check
The test I always use for this is Prince Edward Island -- 100% of their provincial electricity generation is wind, but it only makes up 3% of their usage, the rest being imported from New Brunswick.
From that perspective the map must be at least trying to reflect imports, as PEI isn't listed as 100% green energy.
I'm German and I'm wondering. I have never really looked up the data but the general impression is the following: Germany is doing a lot to reduce CO_2 emissions. At least you have the impression when listening to politicians and reading newspapers. E.g. a few months ago it was announced that Germany is on track with the goals posed by the government (e.g. see https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschland-klimaziele-erfu...). Also in many statistics you can see that already around 50% of the electricity consumed in Germany is from renawble sources.
How comes that on electricitymaps.com Germany is on the higher side of carbon intensity? Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
Closing all the nuclear plants and replacing them with increased coal usage, mainly. Compared to France where nuclear makes up a huge proportion of generation capacity and the UK where gas is the main source (not low carbon, but much lower than coal).
While nuclear is low carbon, it is not cheap and does not like to load follow (whereas renewables can simply curtail and shut down when there is insufficient load or transmission for their generation). If there are consistent excess renewables on a grid, it seriously impairs the economics of nuclear. France’s nuclear reactors load follow but are hard on the mechanicals attempting to do so, and France has some serious issues with reactor maintenance and refurbishment.
Coal and nuclear are the first to be driven out of the generation mix due to their poor economics (or sometimes air pollution regulation as is the case with coal), and remaining coal and natural gas will be driven out over the next decade. Natural gas competes with renewables and batteries, both of which continually decline in cost. Peaking natural gas (vs more efficient combined cycle gas turbine) is already no longer competitive with batteries, and those generators are quickly being replaced.
Tangentially, Germany has twelve interconnectors with neighboring electrical grids. They need not stand up all of this low carbon generation themselves. They also have almost 10GW of hydro storage and almost 5GW of battery storage (so far).
New nuclear isn’t cheap. Existing nuclear is cheap enough. The fact remains that the answer to OP’s question is Germany shuttered its plants and began importing dirty power.
I believe the question should be, “what is the cost of the emissions delta of early turndown of these plants vs continuing to run them until retirement (whether due to economics or longevity),” in both fiat and emissions. It is not as simple as “we should’ve run them until the doors fall off.” That is a simple idea for a complex problem.
> It is not as simple as “we should’ve run them until the doors fall off.” That is a simple idea...
It is also a straw man. The Neckarwestheim reactor, which Germany shut down this year, began operating in 1989 [1]. The average age of America's reactors is almost a fifth longer, with decades life left [2].
Renewables on the other hand definitely do not like load following: they are slow to start up and are severely impacted by regular weather conditions like night and no wind
Citations below, it really comes down to it being uneconomical to load follow when capacity factor declines below a sustainable threshold, which will surely comes as renewables scale up. You can see this today on the daily graph for France when solar production ramps over the day, pushing down nuclear generation.
> You can see this today on the daily graph for France when solar production ramps over the day, pushing down nuclear generation.
That.... is exactly what nuclear plants are literally designed to do.
As for "economics". If we don't discuss the politics of disregard and underinvestment in nuclear power plants, we can't discuss the economics. The only reason your last link exists is precisely because French government sat on its ass and did nothing to the most important energy source in their country. What do you think will happen to your renewable energy after decades of similar disregard?
If we don't discuss where to get energy on a quiet night, we can't discuss "economics". The only reason "Germany has replaced nuclear with renewables" discource exists is because Germany burns insane amounts of coal and imports energy from France and Denmark every time there's a dip in renewables (aka at least every 12 hours or so).
> What do you think will happen to your renewable energy after decades of similar disregard?
I hope it's not the governments' mistake to make next time, given how much easier it is to scale renewables anywhere from multi-gigawatt down to however many milliwatts solar powered pocket calculators were.
> given how much easier it is to scale renewables anywhere from multi-gigawatt down to
Easy to scale nameplate capacity? Yes. Easy to scale generation? No.
Right now, as I write this, in Germany:
- Wind: 66.5 GW installed capacity. Generation: 1.82 GW, or 2.74% of that
- Solar: 69.1 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 0.38 GW, or 0.55% of that
- Hydro: 9.78 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 3.09 GW, or 31% of that
So Germany is busy burning gas (generation: 7.6 GW), coal (generation: 14.2 GW), and "bio fuels" (generation: 5 GW), and importing electricity from as far away as Norway
> As you wrote that, the sun is still low (in practice) on the horizon even here in Berlin.
Exactly
> If you want to argue storage capacity etc. is up to the government
Yes, the storage capacity is also an issue.
> but not where I was going.
I don't know where you were going, but when you say "it's easy to scale renewables" and then say "oh, but the sun is below horizon and inadequate storage capacity", it's clear that it's not that easy to scale renewables.
I don't know if it will be solved by large scale government-backed mega-projects — which can be anything from grid-scale batteries, cubic kilometres of cryo-hydrogen, hydroelectric dams, or (my personal favourite) a global TW-scale power grid — or if it will be spontaneous local interest like electric cars and slightly scaled up versions of the ~kWh battery packs I see in Obi and Kaufland as home power storage.
The home battery packs are already at a level where they just about make sense financially over their working lifetime, but hardly anyone will want to spend €17k for 15+ years of grid independence, especially here where the grid is basically guaranteed to work.
It is the same issue, and pretending that it isn't is disingenous at best. What's the point of "quickly scaling renewables" if they can provide 0.55% of their nameplate capacity?
> I don't know if it will be solved by
Indeed, no one knows how this problem will be solved (and if it can be solved), but it doesn't stop you from statements like "how much easier it is to scale renewables anywhere from multi-gigawatt down to however many milliwatts". Germany has easily scaled renewables to gigawatts. And yet even now, during the day wind is at 2.38% capacity, solar is at 43% capacity, and 15 GW has to come from coal even though if you look at numbers only, there's 67 GW of wind installed.
> especially here where the grid is basically guaranteed to work.
Currently the only reason is working is that countries burn copious amounts of coal and gas to keep up with demand. Even Denmark which is covered in wind turbines currently only utilizes 9.6% of installed wind capacity, and has to import 34% of its electricity from Norway.
But sure do tell me how easy it is to scale renewables without accounting for the actual reality we can observe literally right now?
> What's the point of "quickly scaling renewables" if they can provide 0.55% of their nameplate capacity?
If you're doing that bad on average over the year, you put them in the wrong place.
Fortunately the actual number for PV is about 10%, and even given that capacity factor the world is currently on the path to that alone being sufficient by the early 2030s.
> no one knows how this problem will be solved (and if it can be solved)
It definitely can be solved.
Any of the things I listed, alone or in combination, are sufficient to solve it.
They're almost certainly not the only options, and I'd be surprised if lil' me can pick the best, but they all work.
> Currently the only reason is working is that countries burn copious amounts of coal and gas to keep up with demand.
"Currently".
That's like saying your car is "currently" only as fast as a bicycle while you're in a 20 zone and have yet to reach the autobahn, but then trying to use this fact to conclude cars are incapable of higher performance rather than just you've not done it yet.
And if everyone running the grid were to say "we're not having a grid any more", Kaufland and Obi both sell kWh-range battery packs at low enough prices that, given the way they wear over use, they'll already be cheaper over their lifetime. That lifetime is longer than most people care to invest for, hence why it's not common, but it is already there.
Thing is, industries don't operate on "average energy". Neither do services and people's homes. They don't care if you have 100% energy tomorrow if today you get 0%. Yes, on average you will get 50%. But in practice you'll have complete disruption.
When the sun is down, it's down not just for a singe country or a city. When the wind is not blowing, it's not just a local phenomena for a single country/city. Etc.
> the actual number for PV is about 10%, and even given that capacity factor the world is currently on the path to that alone being sufficient by the early 2030s.
So, riddle me this: if you want to account for days when wind and electricity produce only 1-3% of their installed capacity, how much capacity (and storage) needs to be installed to provide full energy needs?
> That's like saying your car is "currently" only as fast as a bicycle
False analogy
> And if everyone running the grid were to say "we're not having a grid any more", Kaufland and Obi both sell kWh-range battery packs at low enough prices that, given the way they wear over use, they'll already be cheaper over their lifetime.
How many of those battery packs you will need for "no grid"?
> hence why it's not common, but it is already there.
Of course it's nowhere near "there", wherever there may be.
Indeed, but we don't need it everywhere — between transmission lines and that most of the good sites in Germany are pretty close to the major industry and population centres (except Berlin and Brandenburg, which is basically marsh and nature reserves, leading back to the transmission lines).
> Indeed, but we don't need it everywhere — between transmission lines and that most of the good sites in Germany are pretty close to the major industry and population centres
1. Not everywhere, but you need quite a lot of them. You significantly underestimate how much power modern civilisation consumes
2. You can't build a hydroelectric plant/storage in the marshes. You can't build it willy-nilly in any river you want, either. You can't just build it on any lake or in any mountains you like.
> I might be overestimating power lines or people's willingness to have transmission lines near them.
The question isn't about power lines. The question you started with is "Hydroelectric is generally counted as a renewable, and it's also a storage system."
The problem is that yo uneed to build a lot of them, and you can't just build them abywhere you want.
> What's the ampacity of a typical high voltage line?
Zero. The storage capacity of a high voltage line is zero.
> The question isn't about power lines. The question you started with is "Hydroelectric is generally counted as a renewable, and it's also a storage system."
Needless pedantry as everyone uses transmission lines so that power creation and storage aren't in the same physical location as the end use.
If you've got a 5 GW line going from Berlin to, say, the Czech border (where there's currently already a 1 GW hydro plant, I make no claims about environmental capacity for more even though it seems plausible at first glance), then you've got hydro storage keeping the lights on in the city even though it's 215 km away because there's nowhere here to put any hydro storage.
That's why it matters what the amp-acity of a HV line is.
UK is a varied mix so hard to say the main source. gas, coal and oil (almost entirely gas) together are about 40% of generation. The other 60% is imports, biomass, wind, solar, hydro etc.
This is what REALLY bugs me about Germany in general. There is a cultural belief that germans are data driven and unemotional in their decision making. That they are the wise leaders who run the EU. They do not have the populist issues like the UK with brexit or the chaos that france has. They are not like the consuming americans who vote for trump. And yet, the reality of the energy policy demonstrates that Germany is nọt immune to this kind of traps. They prefer to shut down nuclear power plants and yes install many renewables.
They didn’t actually do the math. The point is while renewables may generate 50% of energy, the other half comes from coal which must be turned on when there is no sun or wind, which is so polluting even in comparison to natural gas, that it destroys the overall mix. You can estimate coal as around 700g/kwh(just look at poland when the sun isn’t shining) which divided in half gets you pretty close to Germany’s average of 300g. Had Germany switched to natural gas, they would be much closer to the UK, which did not have an energy transition.
Germany had a much higher peak in emissions in the 1970s and 1980s, unlike the UK which phased out coal early, or France which went all in on nuclear.
German emissions have been rapidly declining since 1990 (even with nuclear reactors closing, because the investment was steered into renewables). They just need a few more years to catch up to their neighbours.
No, it's an impossible equation. Germany cannot win this game without nuclear, barring an unlikely huge breakthrough in battery storage real soon.
Because of renewables' intermittency, there's an upper limit on how much you can have of them in the mix. If the rest of your mix (even just 20%) is coal, your CO2/kWh average is destroyed because its emissions are so much worse than the rest.
There will always be a minimum need for a "base load" energy source in the mix, and only two of them are low carbon : hydro and nuclear. Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro, but they decided to ditch the other one... guess what happens next ?
This is actually not true (or was only very briefly true) [1] Germany has added a lot of renewables over the last couple years. And more than compensated their nuclear plants, which only played a minor role in Germany's electricity production at that point anyway. Of course Germany could have reduced the CO2 output even more if the nuclear plants hadn't been turned off. However, when the discussion heated up again last year it was basically already a moot point. Planning to decommission the plants was already too advanced. There was no personal, no company that wanted to operate the plants, no fuel, etc.
The moment they shut down their last nuclear plant they had several quiet nice in a row. The total output of renewables was about 4% of the installed capacity.
So Germany had to burn copious amount of coal, and gas, and buy energy from France
- Wind: 66.5 GW installed capacity. Generation: 1.82 GW, or 2.74% of that
- Solar: 69.1 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 0.38 GW, or 0.55% of that
- Hydro: 9.78 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 3.09 GW, or 31% of that
So Germany is busy burning gas (generation: 7.6 GW), coal (generation: 14.2 GW), and "bio fuels" (generation: 5 GW), and importing electricity from as far away as Norway
> Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
No, this is CO2 per kwh, so is proportional to population.
What you have just discovered is that Germany does a lot of greenwashing. They may have spent trillions on renewables but, well look at the graphs, they still burn insane amounts of coal.
They chose the politically popular choice of closing nuclear and in doing do sabotaged their climate agenda. Turns out building a grid of only variable renewables doesn't work yet.
Reading this is enormously frustrating. People have been shouting at the top of their lungs, that this will be the inevitable outcome of policy in Germany. Energy policy in Germany has no chance to accomplish its stated goals and is costing people a fortune.
> Germany is doing a lot to reduce CO_2 emissions. At least you have the impression when listening to politicians and reading newspapers. E.g. a few months ago it was announced that Germany is on track with the goals posed by the government (e.g. see https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschland-klimaziele-erfu...).
For one thing, it's not absolutely obvious that germany will reach its CO2 reduction goals, from they own saying [1], but they might not shoot too far: [2]. (It's not very far from them in many sectors, but energy got a bad 2022.) However, I don't know how "ambitious" those objectives are.
> Also in many statistics you can see that already around 50% of the electricity consumed in Germany is from renewable sources. How comes that on electricitymaps.com Germany is on the higher side of carbon intensity? Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
The problem is, basically, that the other 50% is _very_ CO2 heavy , and it only got worse in 2022-2023 because the last nuclear plants closed, and gas got more expensive so more coal got used. [3]
This explains the vast difference between Germany and France on the electricity map: France hardly gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels and wind farms, but the other 80% are from atoms and water drops instead of lignite, which just makes a huuuge difference.
Also, remember that electricity-maps only looks at, well, electricity - which only accounts for roughly 1/4th of the emissions [4]. Germany still has a large industry, and it's building... petroleum cars. (I was surprised to read that as far as "Industry" emissions are concerned, Germany and France are actually rather close, at ~25Mt/y. But I suppose the cars go in to the "Manufactoring" category, where Germany is clearly on top....)
All in all, the per-capita CO2 emission of France ends up being almost twice as low as Germany. Which is maybe why it's easier to reach reduction goal: "all" Germany has to do to get a massive reduction is to clean-up its grid. The country kinda-sovereignly decided to make it harder by ditching nuclear, but it's actually the "easy" part (in the sense that it's transparent for most people when they switch on their TV if the electricity is" clean" or not. The only consideration is whether it is "cheap" or not.)
France is at the stage where it has to reduce the other not-low-hanging-at-all fruit: transport emissions. (Because the current technology forces people to trade relatively cheap, comfortable and versatile gas-powered cars for EVs that are none of those three things - at the moment - and they'll understandably kick and scream to avoid that.)
In a different world, Germany would have invested in R&D to build small and affordable electric cars, while France would have invested in R&D to build smaller and safer nuclear reactors.
Instead, Germany paid software engineers to make car cheat tests [6], and France paid consultants to make the electricity market undecipharable while 1970's nuclear plants where rotting in place [7] ... and then 2022 happened !
Not only Germany uses lots of coal, it also uses a lot of the worst kind of coal, lignite. Lignite is low grade coal, Germany has a lot of it, and burning it in local power plants is pretty much the only thing you can do with it, so that's what Germany did.
It also lacks nuclear (because of political decisions), and hydro (presumably because a lack of suitable sites), two of the big low carbon sources.
So Germany may have 50% renewables, but the next one is the worst in terms of emissions (lignite/coal), then there is gas, which is not as bad as coal, but still bad, and that's about it.
And most of the renewables in Germany is solar, which is, according to the website, one of the highest of the low carbon sources. Hydro, wind and nuclear are all lower. Not a big effect though, almost negligible compared to coal.
Unfortunately that is a wrong impression. Electricitymaps is correct regarding Germany's CO2 emissions.
It has nothing to do with the country's population and industry size, because these figures are the CO2 emitted per kWh of electricity.
The problem is simple : Germany chose to shut down nuclear power and to invest massively in renewables (€500B in wind and solar)
Wind and solar are of course intermittent and, because you can't store electricity at scale, you cannot run a country's electricity grid on these alone, especially a country with heavy 24/7 industry. That is the central lie of the German Energiewende.
In reality you always need some more stable energy sources to handle the "base load", they can be :
- Hydroelectricity (if you have the right geography)
- Coal
- Gas
- Nuclear
Of these four, only hydro and nuclear are low CO2.
You can see on Electricitymaps that some countries like Norway are doing great because they have Hydro for their base load. Germany doesn't have the geography for that, unfortunately.
The only low CO2 choice remaining for German base load is nuclear, but we know what happened to that...
There was a focus on (mainly Russian) gas, which is slightly better than coal, but Putin is using this as a geopolitical weapon now.
So that leaves you with coal, and there are two big problems with that :
1. Coal emits SO much more CO2 per kWh than renewables or nuclear that it completely destroys Germany's average CO2 emissions score. With coal in the mix, you would need not 50% but maybe 90% of renewable electricity to compensate for the insane emissions of the small % of coal. Unfortunately as I mentioned, 90% of renewable electricity isn't possible because of intermittence. Which means Germany won't ever solve this problem unless A. a breakthrough in energy storage is discovered (good luck) or B. it restarts its nuclear power plants and builds new ones.
That is the embarrassing reason why many German politicians would rather talk about the % of renewables in the mix (which is completely meaningless for climate), rather than the CO2/kWh figure (the only thing that counts for climate) where Germany is doing so badly (on average 6-7 times worse than France)
2. Air pollution from coal power plants causes over 10.000 premature deaths in Europe every year
Most of the coal plants in the European top 10 are located in Germany.
Imagine the reaction if a neighbouring country operated another source of energy (say, nuclear) that caused 10.000 deaths / year in the region ? Fukushima was one (1) direct death by radiation, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...)
It's great news that apparently, 60% of Germans are now in favour of nuclear power. I hope that the generation of 1970s Die Grüne activists that caused these disastrous energy policies in Germany are voted out of power asap.
I find it mildly amusing how for all green talk and net zero pledges, EU bureaucrats and wide public does not give much notice to the third-world-level dirty-as-hell coal-powered generation in Poland.
They do - Poland agreed to the same decarbonization targets and participation in the carbon market as the rest of the EU so it had to implement policies supporting them - chiefly in the form a solar power subsidy program.
The program was more successful than the government anticipated and capacity ballooned so much that the grid needs modernization if it's to support more renewables.
Also electricity usage per capita per year is like 25% lower than say in Germany or France, so emissions in absolute terms are lower than they might appear.
There's a long way to go, but the country is on track to meet the goals set - partly because it's actually cheaper that way.
The EU has a cap and trade system ("EU ETS") for large industrial installations. So as far as I understand, the Poland coal plants are not invisible to the EU. They pay a market price for each ton of CO2 emitted.
Poland does try to cancel out the price signal sent by the EU ETS with billions of subsidies. I guess that's part of the reason why they emit so much. But the emission cap still holds; if Poland pays for the right to emit a ton of CO2, then that ton cannot be emitted elsewhere in the EU.
Unlike most of Europe they have very poor starting point with minimal hydroelectric power resources etc which makes things look relatively worse. However their current progress if you look at the graphs is still fast paced.
“In September 2020, the government and mining unions agreed a plan to phase out coal by 2049 which coincides with 100th anniversary of Karol Wojtyła being assigned to st. Florian's parish in Kraków,[10][11] with coal used in power generation falling to negligible levels in 2032“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Poland
I read your sentences three times and I don't get what exactly you're trying to criticize here or what you're raving at?
"All the green talk" is precisely about getting rid of coal-powered generation in Poland (and other EU states), so what the heck is your complaint here?
It sounds like to me that the complaint is why Poland hasn’t switched to green power already. A comment like that demonstrates a lack of understanding about the levels of effort to make such a change, as if the change to green power is as instantaneous and painless as flicking a switch (pun half intended).
This is super cool! For California, my understanding (from PG&E materials) was that highest demand and carbon intensity was around 3pm to 9pm. The graph here seems to show that even though demand/supply is smaller at night, we have very little non-solar renewables so that carbon intensity is pretty bad all night as well... If that's true, I'm curious why PG&E makes it sound like electricity use at night is not as bad. Do they anticipate bringing more wind online and are trying to get ahead with the messaging to the public?
You have a different definition of “bad” than PG&E. You are trying to minimize the release of CO2, they are trying to minimize the spending of dollars. As a huge generalization, building a power plant is more expensive than running it, so being able to run it 24/7 is generally more profitable than having to use “peaker” plants that are only running and profiting from 4-9pm.
In the industry the "duck curve" drives a lot of decision making and messaging around the grid in California.
Energy use late at night is not as bad, because there's less of it used. It's the 3-9pm (Usually I hear 4-9, but same thing) hours when solar supply drops off and demand peaks at the same time that they are speaking about. People plugging in cars to L2 chargers when they get home, lights all go on, AC on, etc. It's usually just talked about in the context of grid availability, not so much with GHG emissions, but things are changing in that direction as regulations continue to change.
Shameless plug - If anyone is interesting in developing in this field, we're hiring at olivineinc.com for C# and node/react developers :)
One concern I have about this map, is that the allocation of natural gas applies a flat coefficient to all natural gas sources. As far as I can tell, it does not give any rebate/reduction for natural gas that has a dual purpose -- namely, to provide heating and cooling in addition to the electricity process.
In other words, there are additional processes being driven by the residual heat, often called combined heat and production or cogeneration. It seems that the CO2 g/kWh should be lowered to reflect that these plants only supply a portion of the CO2 for electricity production. [1]
Being located on the mid-Atlantic rift means they have lots of volcanoes and plentiful geothermal power. So yes, they are 100% renewable, but they are also a bit of a special case.
They do have geothermal plants, but hydro is the bigger factor, accounting for about 75% of electricity generation [1]. Somewhat similar to Norway in having a favorable ratio between wet mountains and small population.
That UK -- Norway link is (or was) the longest undersea electricity cable in the world[1] at 450 miles (720km).
How do the exports and imports balance; Finland is importing 800MW from Sweden then exporting 400MW to Estonia, is it possible some of that is the same power? Norway is importing 425MW from The Netherlands and exporting 1.2GW to the UK and 200MW to Denmark?
Why does the UK export 73MW to Northern Ireland but then import 286MW from the Republic of Ireland, i.e. why doesn't Northern Ireland import from Republic of Ireland and skip the overseas bit?
Keep in mind this is a very 'zoomed out' view of the power grid. In reality every country is going to have grid limits internally and different sources of demand in different places.
For example, in your Finland observation it may be cheaper/easier to supply the north of Finland from Sweden rather than send the power that could otherwise go to Estonia to the other side of the country, probably not a lot of north south distribution internally in Finland because of terrain (I know Norway really struggles with this, you can see huge price differences in the north of Norway vs south of Norway on EPEX Spot - https://www.epexspot.com/en/market-data), so I would assume Finland is the same.
The UK also has huge bottlenecks north/south in distributing power. There's 4GW of HVDC planned to transmit power from Scotland to England, for example. Probably much more is going to be needed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_HVDC
As it happens this has been in the news quite a bit, and we've been told that the Finnish trunk lines are built for this [1]. Finland isn't split up into multiple electricity price areas unlike its neighbors.
There is currently only one small interconnect between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Another one (1500MW) is being built. This will allow Northern Ireland to benefit from Ireland’s substantial wind resources (~2GW).
> Procurement for the supply of materials for the construction of the overhead line is underway. Testing of the final pylon designs is being undertaken, with a view to construction beginning next year in order to have the project fully operational by 2026.
Hmm, maybe this is a "bug" or some intentional way this measurement is made, but when you view the carbon production over time, you can see that some low-carbon sources like wind & solar seem to vary in proportion to the energy being produced. So these aren't exactly zero-carbon because of production and maintenance and whatnot, but it's obviously very low. However, wouldn't this carbon production be annualised at a constant rate - solar power doesn't produce more carbon the brighter the sun shines (does it?)
It makes sense that there's some lookup of X energy source being Y tons co2 per mwh, and this is probably correct when the vast majority of the co2 is coming from the fuel, and the construction + maintenance etc are a rounding error, but this wouldn't be the case for solar, wind, etc.
It's the manufacturing process of the solar panels and replacement being factored in. Obviously, power generation is carbon free during the panels lifecycle but manufacturing today produces co2
I’m not sure of the answer on this website, but if you’re going that route you’d also need to factor in the carbon cost of the building materials for power plants of any type. Steal and concrete aren’t carbon free either.
Can you please elaborate more on this?
I take it this includes CO2 released during manufacturing. Is it averaged over the expected life span? What about for a nuclear plant? Whole I can see how we can estimate CO2 for a panel, I don’t think we can have good idea of a whole plant.
Ideally it's lifecycle carbon footprint averaged over expected power production during that time, but the numbers aren't always directly comparable and the error bars are huge to boot.
With solar, most of the carbon footprint comes from the massive energy requirements needed to produce the panels, and countries that use coal to produce panels like China have a significantly higher carbon footprint than say the EU. Then there's the matter of where you install them, panels in most of Europe will have a CO2/kWh figure similar to to panels installed in north-west Canada, while panels installed in the US will have a similar figure to panels installed in southern Europe and northern Africa. Newer panels generally have a longer lifespan and are more efficient so will have a lower number even if the total footprint stays the same. Should the albedo effect be considered with solar? It matters if you plan to cover a light desert with dark panels. How often it rains can also ironically have a difference, as rain helps clean the panels keeping them running efficiently.
With nuclear, there's the mostly fixed costs of constructing and decommissioning the plants, the ongoing cost of running and maintaining the plants, disposing of spent fuel, and with most of the cost coming from mining the fuel. To me nuclear seems a little more straight forward to calculate, but there's still variability that can come from the availability and difficulty of mining the ore. There's also political issues to consider. If your country decides to shut down your nuclear plants prematurely, like Germany did, the huge upfront cost of building the plants can't be recouped by running them for an additional 10, 20, 30+ years until it becomes necessary to decommission them.
Regardless of how renewables are compared to nuclear, coal and gas are the elephants in the room when it comes to CO2 produced per kWh.
Note that the "CO2/kWh equivalent emissions" given on the page are provided with source to document describing methodology: UNECE 2022. Can't link you to specific place right now, but quick google gives a bunch of starting points like https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...
Inside you will find description of the model for various power sources including what total lifecycle sources of emissions contribute how much.
Consider also the ridiculous power density of nuclear fuels, best visualized IMHO in this good old XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1162/
It’s live updating, so 0% of the electricity right now is being generated by coal (ie. The coal power plant is off). Note that Greece says “estimated” though so I presume they don’t have the actual live numbers.
You can view averages from the past 30 days, 12 months, and 6 years though and that shows the percentage of coal generation being about 800MW over the past 12 months.
Ah that could be it. They state that they generate 100% of all their power needs with hydro, but I know power markets are weird black magic entities. It's possible they could really generate all their power needs with hydro, but then sell that power to another company and then buy-in coal for less.
By reference do you mean area? I only know any of this from the annual reports they sent when I lived in Lynchburg. I do know that the do not cover anywhere east of the James River.
Thanks, I just wondered where you got the info and if it might be publicly accessible. I lived in the area too and was curious where my power came from.
If you get a paper statement then they ought to be sending you an annual report explaining power creation stuff, total and average usage, etc. When I switched to the online statement I stopped getting the report. Should be online too, just no clue where..d
The addition of China data would make the legend useless, but it still goes to show out sized some things are, while the UK continues to chase Net Zero at the expense of its citizen's wealth, other countries (India, China, the US) prioritise their economy.
Heading towards a clean energy future is great, but it's costing our poorer citizens unequally more than our wealthier ones. See: ULEZ.
I'm always at a loss with this argument. How does chasing cheaper sources of energy that also happen to be renewable hurt the poor? Gas generators cost the most per kWh to run. Our electricity prices rocketted because of natural gas prices rocketing.
If we'd managed to get off gas sooner we'd have clean cheap power, and energy independence.
It's clearly not cheaper, is it! Energy prices are higher than they have ever been! What are yuo talking about? Do you know anyone that lives in poverty? I do, I help them financially. These people are struggling, and NetZero is not helpful.
Wind is not cheap. We can do better than this
Edit: Seriously, I'm willing to be convinced but I am at a loss whenever I see people deny that increased inflation hurts people with less money than it does people like you. If you need me to explain how it works (that as a % of your income, poorer people will pay FAR MORE in energy, housing, food, and other inflation-related costs, which, you know, is in part fueled by chasing NetZero) I'll happily sacrifice my time to help you understand.
Poorer people in the ULEZ area don’t own cars, they live in flats overlooking car ridden streets. Besides ULEZ is not about stopping Co2 emissions or net zero, it’s about removing dirty smoke from the roads poor people (the ones you see on the bus) live on.
This thing again, with Sweden being all green while one of its biggest companies is busy with cutting down trees left, right and center, and then there's of course Norway, which have made their money on oil and gas, with the latter being extremely lucrative especially now, after the war in Ukraine started.
Of course, I know this is "only" about the way they're generating electricity, yadayadayada, because I'm sure the only thing stopping the African countries from going all "green" when generating electricity is the lack of will, not the lack of money (which, again, countries like Norway and Sweden acquired on the back of very non-green actions).
And then there's a question about how "green" hydro is in the first place, as even Khrushchev himself received a lot of critics from inside the Party for the environment devastation brought by building lots of hydro projects on the Volga [1]
Is there a collection like an "awesome maps" list anywhere?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37187760