PowerLight

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Project PowerLight
PowerLight.jpg
Show energy mix of dutch power generation as a pie chart on a LED ring
Status In progress
Contact bertrik
Last Update 2022-07-11

The concept

Draw the current power generation-mix as a kind of pie chart on a LED ring light, with colors representing a fraction of a specific power generation source.

For example:

  • blue: wind power
  • yellow: solar power see below
  • green: power from biomass see below
  • purple: power from nuclear
  • red: fossil
  • grey: other

Power generation data

There is no open data available with reasonably complete power generation fractions!

The solar power problem

In particular the solar power fraction is incomplete, but also the biomass figures are missing. See:

There is a model to estimate this fraction at https://api.netanders.io/, however you cannot use this API without a key (and you can't just get a key).

Some ideas to fix this gap somewhat:

  • Correlate official reported solar data with the model, and extract a kind of tennet-reported->best-guess-actual multiplication factor
  • Use yesterday's solar prediction data from ENTSO-E. The number seen here is about 6 GW peak, which seems to correlate reasonably well with the number shown at https://energieopwek.nl/ (which bases itself on the netanders model)

Hardware

Parts:

Software

The software consists of two parts:

  • backend part that collects the power generation data
  • light part that visualizes the power generation as fractions on a LED ring

Backend

Source code: https://github.com/bertrik/energymix-server

To be implemented, this will probably run on my web page stofradar.nl. A REST-like resource like http://stofradar.nl:9001/energy/latest

Returns a JSON-structure like:

{
  "time": 1657057500,
  "total": 9122,
  "mix": [
    { "id": "solar", "power": 0, "color": "#FFFF00"},
    { "id": "wind", "power": 4, "color": "#0000FF"},
    { "id": "fossil", "power": 86, "color": "#FF0000"},
    { "id": "nuclear", "power": 5, "color": "#FF00FF"},
    { "id": "other", "power": 4, "color": "#444444"},
    { "id": "waste", "power": 1, "color": "#444444"}
  ]
}
  • time is a unix time stamp in seconds, representing the end of the period that the power figures refer to
  • total is the total current electrical power (megawatt), suitable for display (inside the ring for example)
  • energymix is an array of power sources, each with:
    • a short unique id
    • most recent known power (megawatt)
    • hex color, for display on the led ring

Light

Source code: https://github.com/bertrik/PowerLight