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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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Display capacity for countries without real-time production data #4500

Open hboisgibault opened 2 years ago

hboisgibault commented 2 years ago

Most countries do not have production or consumption data. However, some of them have capacity data (eg. Armenia). Capacity data is easier to get because databases of plants are available. I would like the capacity data to be shown even if there is no production data. It is not shown at all currently. It would enable the map to have data for more countries (even if incomplete and not real time) and give a better picture of the global electricity mix.

Solution is to show such countries in a different color (for example a lighter grey) and when user clicks on the country, a chart of the latest capacity data is shown in the country panel, similar to the production chart. There would be no CO2 emission gauge, no daily or price chart, just the current capacity electricity mix.

Capacity would be provided by hand in the zones or capacity folder with a source and date (see issue #4396 and PR #4435 that are related). Backend is not needed because all the info is in JSON. If historical data is present, a historical chart could be shown as well.

For countries that do not have a parser and that do not have capacity data, nothing would change.

Kongkille commented 2 years ago

I think that's an interesting idea.

One of the reasons we currently don't show any data for countries with no production data is that we want to engage visitors to help get the data.

If we end up doing something like this, I think we definitely should make it clear to users that we are still missing production data.

hboisgibault commented 7 months ago

Thanks for the reply @Kongkille :) Do you think it would be interesting to add it with a clear differentiation of production data ? It would be especially useful for large countries without data such as China. Historical capacity could also be shown. I could start a PR for this.

VIKTORVAV99 commented 7 months ago

FYI the backend is definitely still needed so this is not straight forward.

We use the backend to avoid having to bundle megabytes of raw data in the app which can't be updated without updating the whole app.

It's something we have considered though and will likely do in the future but it's not a priority at the moment as we are focusing on making the data we have as clear as possible and to enable future changes.