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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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Differences between wind production figures in GB and Drax Insights #3047

Open corradio opened 3 years ago

corradio commented 3 years ago

I'm just confused as to why there's such a big difference between your data and that quoted in the guardian as a source 'Drax insights' ... https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?_k=cnspvr which consistantly shows the UK wind generation as up to 3GW higher than yourselves and also isive data.

gwpicard commented 3 years ago

After some initial research, this may be because of [Drax accounting for embedded wind generation](Drax uses the National Grid estimations in their data).

According to the NationalGridESO: Embedded generation is embedded in the distribution network and is invisible to Electricity System Operator (ESO). Their effect is to suppress the electricity demand during periods of high wind and solar. The true output of these generators is not known so an estimate is provided based on ESO’s best model."

Embedded wind is essentially any wind produced downstream from the transmission network, such within the distribution network.

Drax uses NationalGridESO's models for embedded wind - this may not explain all of the discrepancy between eMap and the Drax data but is perhaps somewhere to start the investigation.

jarek commented 3 years ago

How fancy are the models that Drax uses to estimate embedded wind? Is it more sophisticated than current load factor of grid-connected wind * embedded wind capacity?

gwpicard commented 3 years ago

@jarek good question. I think we would need to do a bit more research on models used by both NationalGridESO and Drax and where/whether they overlap. It may be as simple as using a current load factor but personally I am not sure