Thanks Iain!

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

"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%."

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...

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).

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.

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…

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

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

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.

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...

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).

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.