Electricity Maps

Staying on the topic of climate tools from last week, let’s look at energy. Energy production is one of the most fascinating aspects of our society. It is a core component of almost everything we have to make our society run, powering home and industrial machines, civil and military infrastructure, the digital world, and more recently transportation. Without the complex energy structures we have, none of the modern world would be possible, and furthermore the way we architect and distribute energy has a vast impact on downstream systems. Similar to oil, if the prices of energy go up (note these are not entirely independent), everything else gets expensive as energy remains a core input for almost all major societal processes. Needless to say, energy production, transportation, and storage is important.

I wanted to include two websites here that do tangential things to help highlight energy production. First is Electricity Maps, a website that shows estimated or actual electricity load, net flow, source mix, and the carbon intensity in different regions. For each region, it breaks down how much electricity is produced by biomass sources, geothermal, hydroelectric (usually dams), solar power, wind, nuclear, battery storage, hydro storage, coal, gas, oil, or an unknown source, at any time throughout the day. You can see the associated carbon intensity. This helps understand where those countries with renewables are striving, which tends to be those with access to hydroelectric or geothermal power.

I am not quite sure why they separated the regions as they have.

A few things I learned with this tool that was interesting to me. The first is that in the California region, during the day we have 50% of power generated by solar energy, with battery storage helping us at night, but ultimately we still have 20-60% of our energy production from natural gas sources, with the rest (hydro, nuclear, etc.) making up the remaining difference.

Another area I found interesting was France, whose investment into Nuclear throughout the 1960s to today seems to have paid off well, with a constant 65% of the baseload coming from Nuclear sources. They’re also able to utilize solar power during the day for 25%, making them one of the cleanest producers of energy in Europe. A smart investment can make all the difference, especially in an energy crunch time like the present. Contrasting that with Germany who, to my surprise, can produce 65% of their energy from solar at peak sunlight during the day, but have to return to 35% coal sources (which are particularly bad for carbon emissions).

The regions with 100% renewables are those with large hydroelectric and geothermal capabilities. These include Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, Nepal, and Paraguay.

While they post their methodology for data collection and carbon estimation, and overall it seems that the data is high quality, I will note some anomalies. First, the map claims that Haiti is 100% renewable energy. Though it notes that it is a synthetic estimate, it rather surprised me that such a poor nation could have advanced renewable methods to generate 100% of its energy. And indeed, a simple google search shows that this isn’t the case.

How many more examples are like this I can’t say, it seems that synthetic estimates are to be less trusted than data from actual sources.

The site also has an API that you can access if you are a developer with an idea for this data. I think it has historical data, real time data, and forecast estimates.

The other website I wanted to look at was OpenGridWorks. From my understanding, this is mostly a UI wrapper on OpenStreetMap data associated with energy systems, though they may have done additional work since then. While there is so much to look at with this website, a few features that I really liked include the ability to click on a site and look at it on Google maps, the ability to see at least some of the sea cable lines, and the size correlating with energy production figures.

Again, I’ll start with California since that is my homeland. When I came across this website a few months ago, one major thing I noticed was the large green bubble in the middle of California, near San Luis Obispo. As it turns out, this is the last remaining Nuclear power plant in California, Diablo Canyon, operated by PG&E. It provides 5-10% of the state’s power at any point in time. I also found out that they operate tours, and since I had some friends in SLO, I decided to take the trip down and tour it.

I will say that the facility is pretty cool and the tour staff was kind, knowledgeable, and excited to inform us about the benefits of nuclear and the safety systems and precautions they have. I came out with a deeper respect for the importance of nuclear energy and of civic engagement for industrial facilities. No matter your personal opinions on nuclear power, I recommend a visit to Diablo Canyon. The east coast has a lot more nuclear power plants than the west coast. France has a lot.

Another facility I learned about was the Moss Landing battery storage and gas production facility. As a UC Santa Cruz student, I passed that region many a time, whether by driving, flying, or just seeing the two large smoke stack towers from afar. Little did I know the importance of the facility, hosting one of the largest battery storage facilities in the state, with a large gas production facility next door. There was recently a fire at the battery facility, and I am unaware of its capacity at this exact moment. I was able to fly over before the fire and get a couple pictures of the facility from above.

Seeing where the major sea cables and electric transmission towers are placed is crazy, and really makes me appreciate all the complex infrastructure, each wire that has been laid, each tower erected, in order to provide power to the world. Slightly unrelated but I was walking next to Ames Research Center one day at these 115 kV wires, and I could hear static buzzing from the lines on the tower. Apparently this is called corona discharge, in which the electric field around the wires ionizes the surrounding air, and causing the noise. All I could think was how cool it was that the electricity passing through those wires powering the bay area.

The map also shows the datacenters, solar power fields, power substations, and all the rest of the energy infrastructure we have. I marvel at the society that humans have built, and these tools give a portal to explore it from the comfort of your own home, how cool is that!?