Dogger Bank B has overtaken Dogger Bank A! At least temporarily… Why? Early yesterday morning (May 20th) Dogger Bank A reduced the wind farm output to 0 MW for "planned maintenance" According to REMIT this downtime is expected to last until June 1st, though this could change.

Not a bad way to end the day 😌

Burbo Bank this evening

Burbo Bank this evening

Will we see a new peak output at Dogger Bank A soon? Output has gradually been increasing over the past weeks after being dramatically cut at the end of last year due to various issues. The peak output of 680 MW was set in November, out of a total potential output of 1,200 MW.

Did I accidentally make Ceefax for wind farms? 👾 This is a new toy that I created over the weekend, a 128x128 LED matrix display that shows the live status of any wind farm in Great Britain that's on the balancing system.

Not a bad way to end the day 😌

Here's how constraint costs are looking for 2026 so far, compared to the previous two years. We're not half way through the year and yet we've already spent over half the 2025 total cost for replacement energy via gas. Wind curtailment costs in isolation are also higher than this time last year.

Absolutely demolished all five Bobiverse books in a little over a week. I'm addicted, I can't wait for the next one. The special hardback editions are really nice too! And yes, my books are in a completely random order and it bugs me immensely. I'll get around to moving everything… soon.

Any recommendations on things to do and places to stay in Tokyo (and wider Japan)? It'll be my first visit and I'm just a tad excited to explore the city and fully nerd out.

This is my grandad, he built the original R2-D2 for the first Star Wars film… #MayThe4th #MayTheFouthBeWithYou #StarWars

Just realised I've been writing code in one way or another for nearly 30 years 🤯 I'd say today I'm much less in love with the coding part of code, though I still love the magical way it allows me to create things and make my ideas real.

What's going on at Dogger Bank A? 🤔 Originally set to be completed in 2024, we're now well into 2026 with the wind farm due to be completed the second half of this year.

Turns out heat pumps are great* and really do bring bills down… *so long as they don't remove your dependency on gas (from grass)

What happens when a storm hits an under-construction offshore wind farm? Storm Amy was the first named storm of the 2025/26 season and broke the UK's October low-pressure record. But what does a storm like that actually look like 130km offshore at Dogger Bank wind farm?

Said mains cable. I couldn't have hit it better if I tried!

Yet more FUD and bullshit with zero data backing up the claims…

Absolutely nonsense. All you have to do is look at real data from real installs… Oh wait, we already did that in realtime for our thousands and thousands of real heat pumps in real homes, and made it public: octopus.energy/cosy-heat-pu...

How relentlessly vocal the anti-renewables crowd are is a great barometer for good news happening somewhere. It's actually the way I find out about some of the positive industry events, I shit you not.

I have a feeling this doesn't have much to do with the military

No shit www.theguardian.com/environment/...

First power at Sofia wind farm! That's now three of the four massive offshore wind farms at Dogger Bank generating electricity.

It begins. The wave of AR3/AR4 mega projects at bargain basement prices (e.g. Sofia is ~£55/MWh in 2026 money) is starting to wake up. Dogger Bank A and B emerging, too. Hornsea 3 just around the corner. All of which will be highly competitive with prevailing wholesale prices.

First power at Sofia wind farm! That's now three of the four massive offshore wind farms at Dogger Bank generating electricity.

A similar hope to the green gas thing I suppose…

I was about to make a coffee to help wake me up but decided to drill through a mains cable in my home instead. That worked much better… 😳

Great Britain threw away 5GW of wind power during Storm Dave & replaced it using gas 🔥 That's one and a half Sizewell C-sized nuclear power stations, or four Dogger Bank A-sized wind farms. Or to put it another way, it's a shit load of power. Why throw it away? Because our straw isn't big enough…

It'll never get old having this a short drive away from home

Did we miss out on the first 24GW wind output record in GB yesterday due to a substation outage? I noticed there's something curious going on with Moray East wind farm… What I can tell from REMIT is that the offshore substation tripped the evening of the 25th and knocked out over 300MW of capacity

What if you could play real-world wind farms in Turbine Tycoon? This is what I've been looking at in my latest experiments. I thought it would be fun to let you pick various real wind farms around Great Britain (maybe even the world) and then let you loose to see how well you can manage them.

Here's where the wind records stand so far today I track this all on my website, along with a "what if" scenario had the grid constraints not happened (link below)

It keeps on going

Did we just break the wind generation record today, twice? On the train right now so will validate later…

Genuinely excited about the plug-in solar news in the UK, I'll absolutely be doing this! I've wanted solar for ages but I have a weird roof so the idea of experimenting with something simple in the garden or on the garage is very appealing. Patiently awaiting more on how this is going to work 👀

Do they? Would love to see the data behind that… octopus.energy/cosy-heat-pu...

Watching NKT Victoria (in purple) laying the export cable for Dogger Bank A back in 2022. You can also see the various guard vessels in red as they bounce around and monitor the area around the cable. Vessel data: Kpler Visuals: Deck.gl (mostly)

I'm building custom tools to help work out exactly when construction events happened at Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm. In this case, the pink line is the cable-laying vessel and the dotted lines are gaps in the AIS coverage which complicate matters.

Internet person: "But this unsubstantiated datapoint about a heat pump that 'someone I know' / my plumber mate / [insert random third-party] says they're shit" How about near-realtime data from every single of the real Cosy heat pumps installed by Octopus Energy? octopus.energy/cosy-heat-pu...

What happens when a storm hits an under-construction offshore wind farm? Storm Amy was the first named storm of the 2025/26 season and broke the UK's October low-pressure record. But what does a storm like that actually look like 130km offshore at Dogger Bank wind farm?

The data views in SimCity (2013) directly inspired my early dataviz work and are partly responsible for me picking it up as a career. It's now 13 years since that game was released. Back in 2000, a 13-year-old me would have had to wait another 13 years to play it. That's a lot of thirteens…

Living near the sea has its perks

Do I need a reason to add a retro halftone print effect for Turbine Tycoon? I've always loved the warm analogue style of mid-century printed media, particularly the retro-futuristic illustrations seen in Eagle magazine. It's an effect I've wanted to explore and apply to my work for a long time.

"Grok is this true?" It's terrifying how normal this has become.

Animating Storm Amy in 1km resolution The first named storm of the 2025/26 season, Storm Amy broke the UK's October low-pressure record. The highest recorded gust was 96mph, though it's possible there were even higher gusts as a power outage knocked out the recording station.

Do we have first power at Dogger Bank B? According to the balancing data we have 26MW of output today at Dogger Bank B, which will eventually have an installed capacity of 1.2GW. This also implies two (out of 95) of the 13 MW Haliade-X wind turbines have been installed in recent weeks.

Uncovering the hidden patterns during the construction of Dogger Bank A, one of the world's largest offshore wind farms… Each cell in the grid shows a full month of construction, using AIS data from Kpler to follow every vessel as they go about the construction of the giant 1.2GW wind farm.

What does it look like to build one of the world's largest offshore wind farms, one month at a time? Each cell in the grid shows a full month of construction, using AIS data from Kpler to follow every single vessel as they go about the installation and commissioning of the giant 1.2GW wind farm.

Vessel movement around Dogger Bank & Sofia wind farms during November and December last year… I've only scraped the surface of what's possible using the high-resolution AIS data. Thanks again to Kpler for providing it so I can continue my extremely niche visualisation projects.

Upgraded the fibre from 1Gbit to 1.6Gbit today Happy so far, especially as this is over WiFi (7)!

Added storms to Turbine Tycoon with procedural lightning and sound effects ⛈️ Whenever there's a storm in the game the entire mood shifts, the rain starts, the wind picks up and then the thunder and lightning begin.