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electricitymaps / electricitymaps-contrib

A real-time visualisation of the CO2 emissions of electricity consumption
https://app.electricitymaps.com
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Import intensity could fallback on yearly averages when missing/unknown #1576

Closed eimose closed 5 years ago

eimose commented 6 years ago

When a country, or area, is importing electricity from another country and the exporting country's production sources are unknown, it seems as if the intensity of the imported electricity is set to be equal to the intensity of the importing country. But this is hardly meaningful. Would it be possible to set the unknown intensity of imported electricity to an average or mean value from a historical period? E.g. the last month or the same month last year. Or to the last available dataset (depending on how old that is).

I can see that it happens quite often for Norway, that "Data [is] temporarily unavailable". The intensity of the electricity exported to Sweden is low, while it is medium high when exported to West Denmark.

corradio commented 6 years ago

That's a very good idea, which I also wanted to implement. I think it should be quite easy to do on our side. I'll add it on our backlog so we discuss it internally.

corradio commented 6 years ago

@brunolajoie any take on this?

brunolajoie commented 6 years ago

I think it's a very good idea too! It requires to compute a fixed default GHG intensity for all zone of electricityMap, I guess, right?

corradio commented 6 years ago

that's right

eimose commented 6 years ago

You forecast the co2 intensity for all areas. Couldn't you just use that when actual values are missing?

corradio commented 6 years ago

Indeed @eimose but it poses certain threats as people might scrape the results and not pay for our API :(

eimose commented 5 years ago

That makes sense. However, I would think the forecast is only valuable if it is for the following 48 hours and not if it is only for the current hour. In other words, you could make the carbon intensity forecast for the current hour available instead of the full forecast and then use this value for a country, if the data source fails for a period. This would also challenge you on speed, as you would need to make it for all countries.