Multinational support: research electricity grid APIs for other countries

[sadielbartholomew]

From a Twitter thread relating to cats, some folk were enquiring as to whether it works or could work for locations outside of the UK (see original quotes given below for the context, if useful). I agree that it would be nice to provide support for countries not in Britain, assuming of course we can find and use APIs for other national electricity system grids comparable to the National Grid ESO API we have made use of so far.

The first step would be to research whether there are other such APIs we could make use of. Then we can get a feel for how multi-national in scope cats could be. Alternatively, we could decide to limit our scope solely to the UK, to avoid the complications. What do people think? It would be especially useful to hear from those with more knowledge of electricity systems than I (I have very little!).

Either way, we should clarify the location scope of cats in the documentation. Since our README doesn't mention explicitly that it only works for places in GB, we should add some brief text to clarify that straight away (to be updated if we eventually wider our location scope in line with this Issue). (I'll do that shortly in a commit.)

Twitter thread background

(See also the link above for original source.)

Does it work outside the U.S. ? I mean because of the grid data it depends on ?

It uses the UK @NationalGridESO API, but presumably other countries have equivalent ones?

Sorry for assuming U.S. was the default 😉. Probably, there's something equivalent elsewhere, too. Would be cool to add some resources to the http://README.md

Yeah, people from other countries should definitely raise issues with info for their grid.

[sadielbartholomew]

GitHub is not well right now and seemed to open this Issue multiple times (better than not opening it at all and me losing my opening comment, which was the alternative I thought had happened, phew!). Closing the extra ones...