Tag Archives: electricity

Climate & Energy

Electricity Map

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In looking for information related to my ny-power demo (which shows the realtime CO2 intensity on the New York power grid), I discovered Electricity Map. This is doing a similar thing, but at a global scale. It started primarily focused on Europe but is an open source project, and has contributions from all over the world. I helped recently on some accounting and references for the NY ISO region.

You’ll notice a lot of the map is grey in the US. That’s because while most of the public ISOs publish their real time data on the web, private power entities tend not to. It’s a shame, because you can’t get a complete picture.

What also is notable is how different the power profile looks like between different regions in the US.

It’s also really interesting if you take a look at Europe

Germany is quite bad on it’s CO2 profile compared to neighboring countries. That’s because they’ve been turning back on coal plants and they shut down their nuclear facilities. Coal makes up a surprisingly high part of their grid now.

The entire map is interactive and a great way to explore how energy systems are working around the world.

Climate & Energy

Power usage after going Geothermal and EV

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In November 2017 we replaced our Fuel Oil Heating system with a Geothermal one from Dandelion and bought a Chevy Bolt EV, which we’re using as the primary car in the house. That for us means about 1000 miles a month on it. Central Hudson never actually read our meter in January, so applied an estimated based on our old usage. We finally got a meter reading, so now have a 2 month power usage that I can compare to the last couple of years.

By the Numbers

4700 kWh.

That seems like a lot, but I do have counters on both the furnace and the EV, which were ~2200 kWh and ~800 kWh respectively during this time period. Which leaves us at 1700 kWh for the rest of our load. That’s compares to 1600 kWh last year, and 1500 kWh the year before.

There is also new electric load in the hot water system, which seems to be running pretty efficiently getting dumped waste heat from the water furnace.

This includes the stretch of time where we had a 14 day cold snap with 20 degree below average temperatures (ending with a record low). So while it’s hard to compare to last year directly, it’s pretty favorable. I’m sure that were we on oil we’d have had at least one tank fill during that window if not two, the oil trucks have been running pretty constant in the neighborhood.

 

Opening the power bill had a momentary “oh wow”. But then realizing we no longer have an oil bill, and we’ve only paid for 1 or 2 tanks of gas in the Subaru in this window puts the whole thing in perspective.