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Robin Hawkes

@robhawkes.bsky.social

860 followers 68 following 210 posts

🐙 DataViz at @octopus.energy ⚡️ Obsessed with maps and energy ✨ Creator of ViziCities 👨‍💻 Previously Wood Mackenzie & devrel at Mozilla

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Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 11

Wind output and curtailment in Scotland during Storm Floris

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 10

Thanks Iain!

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 10

Experimenting with the styling of the wind particles as well as the colour ramp for the wind speed layer.

Kinda loving how much detail you can see now from the Meteomatics EURO1k weather model

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

Probably as we still turned up a lot of gas that day to make up the curtailed wind energy

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

"The renewables outturn values are underestimated in this report because they exclude embedded generation and wind farms which do not have Operational Meters. As of 2025, NESO estimates this representation of wind farms with Operational Meters to be approximately 82%."

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

Got it. I don't include embedded wind generation whereas Kate does as far as I can tell.

My source data is here if you're curious.

bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-b...

bmrs.elexon.co.uk

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

I don't know how much solar is in Scotland but the wind curtailment was due to the boundary constraints more than anything else (it's marked as such in the source data).

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

What figure on my site and hers are you referring to exactly?

There's many reasons there might be a difference, most likely is that I don't know if Kate removes wind curtailment, and also if she's including (or estimating) embedded wind generation.

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

Super excited to explore more with this weather data as it allows me unprecedented insight into hyper-local conditions around individual wind farms, perhaps even individual wind turbines.

Much more coming soon…

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

This time I'm using high resolution wind speed data from Meteomatics using their EURO1k model [1], visualised using WeatherLayers [2].

[1] www.meteomatics.com/en/weather-m...
[2] weatherlayers.com

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 8

A zoomed in view of wind farm curtailment in Scotland during Storm Floris…

The yellow rings are showing the curtailed volume at each wind farm as a proportion of their installed capacity.

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 6

Are the @neso-energy.bsky.social Operational Forums recorded anywhere? I'm unable to take part live and so keep missing out of them 😢

Some recordings are on the website but not all of them. For example, July 16th has slides but is missing a recording…

www.neso.energy/what-we-do/s...

Operational Transparency Forum | National Energy System Operator

Join our weekly forum to find out more about ENCC actions.

www.neso.energy

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 1

I have star ratings at the end of each bar, though admittedly quite tiny and not easy to read ✨

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 1

Spot the moment I lost momentum picking up a book that I couldn't get into and ultimately avoided reading…

I haven't given up on that book but I've accepted that I needed to stop reading it for now as it was stopping me reading anything at all.

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 1

That's solving a different problem but ultimately yes, enough houses with batteries can absolutely make a difference.

Even without batteries though, consumer demand flexibility has already proven to be a practical tool in the box.

www.neso.energy/industry-inf...

Demand Flexibility Service explained | National Energy System Operator

Find out why we have introduced the service, how you can take part and more in this DFS explainer.

www.neso.energy

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 1

Individually a home battery isn't going to help much but en-masse at a regional level they can absolutely make a difference.

The problem is that the batteries would need to be centrally controlled in some way, which isn't impossible and is already being experimented with (EVs are great for this).

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Aug 1

I've never read as many books in a single year and I don't plan on stopping…

I also don't plan on stopping keeping track and making pointless data visualisations from my reading data 🤓

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 25

Many things to work on but it's a start…

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 25

To be completely clear, this is only showing the accepted gas offers and isn't showing the gas output prior to balancing.

The wind and gas scales are slightly different too, I need to work on a better way of comparing all the curtailment and turn-up using a consistent scale.

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 25

Experimenting with adding gas power plants on the map so you can see turn-up in the south in response to wind curtailment in the north.

The red rings show gas turn-up scaled to the capacity of each power plant. I'm currently showing all gas offers so it still needs work.

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 24

It's not daft at all!

The tiny purple circles that don't move are wind farms not curtailed (hence Hornsea showing 0MW).

The larger / animated circles show the wind farms with curtailment, as a % of installed capacity.

I imagine there are ways that I can improve on the visuals going forward.

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 24

🍇

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 24

Grid upgrades will eventually improve this, though it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Check my live renewables map here:

renewables-map.robinhawkes.com

GB Renewables Map

Live map showing realtime renewable energy generation in Great Britain

renewables-map.robinhawkes.com

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 24

The result means that we pay wind farms to switch off when it's windy and then pay again (a lot more) to replace the energy using gas generation.

In total that day cost over £18million, including £11million for the replacement energy.

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · Jul 24

We had plenty of available wind to run the wind farms, but what we didn't have was enough capacity on the grid to get that energy where it was needed.