Electricity generation & demand site.

Published April 24, 2009 by Morgan Nichol | Comments (1)

Live graphs of generation sources and current load of New Zealand electricity network.

You’ve got to check out this brilliant website for Energy Market at em6live.co.nz, it shows the current usage & capacity of various energy sources around New Zealand as well as graphs of recent & current network load in different regions, even the current energy flow between islands.

Really fascinating stuff, and so well presented.

Love it.

Can’t help but wonder why so much gas is being burned when the hydro capacity appears to be so far underused, though. Hopefully it’s just that the lakes are being topped up and will be tapped more when winter heating drives more load in the coming months, or something along those lines.

(Or possibly it’s that running the hydro at full capacity the lakes would look like the plug had been pulled out, but I’m not sure if it means “capacity while maintaining current/safe lake levels” or if it means “maximum possible generation”.)

Would be great to see something similar for internet bandwidth. Beautiful graphs of which protocols generate most usage at varying times of day, and who is using what around the country, as well as an overall international flow.

  • http://www.em6live.com Richard

    Thanks for the comments on our website – we’re glad you like it.

    You are right, the generation capacity is the installed capacity of generating units, or “maximum possible generation”.

    Regarding the gas being burned vs hydro comment, much of the hydro power is in the lower half of the South Island and there is limited transmission capacity to deliver it to the North Island, where most of the people live.

    Your observation re hydro is also correct; in laymans terms, you can’t just run hydo flat out all of the time because a) you would quickly run out of water and b) the transmission system couldn’t physically deliver the energy just from hydro stations to the customers.

    Would be nice if this was possible though – cheap, clean energy!

 
 
     
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