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.

Looks like I'm starting a newsletter! 📰 Rounding up my recent work ✨ More energy visuals 📈 More energy analysis 🧠 More commentary and insights 🔬 Behind the scenes of my visuals and analysis 🔥 Highlighting interesting energy-related stuff I've stumbled upon Links to subscribe below 👇

Confirming wind turbine construction status and vessel positions using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery 🛰️ Last week I added SAR imagery to my Dogger Bank & Sofia construction timelapse animation as a way to confirm when foundations and wind turbines have been installed and which vessels were involved.

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.

Who wants to play SpinCity? An offshore wind farm game I might be working on… 👀 The concept is a cute, simple game that anyone can play in-browser to get an understanding of offshore wind farms from an economical perspective as well as a construction, operation and general "holy shit that's cool"

What are people using for todo lists nowadays? I need to start using them again @todoist.com was my go to previously but curious if things have changed, esp. with all the AI shenanigans.

Animated custom 3D wind turbine models for my Dogger Bank & Sofia construction visualisation? Sure why not! 🤓 I had fun creating these miniature wind turbine models, loosely inspired by the real Haliade-X turbines that are being used on location.

Some updates… First, I'm starting a newsletter! It'll be a likely monthly round up of my energy visualisation and analysis, as well as other insights and behind-the-scenes stuff. I'll be posting it both as a LinkedIn newsletter and an email newsletter, the links to sign up are in the thread.

Using my voice to chat with Claude (and Claude Code) has been a complete game-changer for me It's also got me using Whisper for dictation nearly everywhere else I can use it. Why haven't I tried this sooner?! 🤯

Any recommendations for a hands-off newsletter service that doesn't cost a fortune? Ideally one that also deals with UK data protection for me. Context: I'll soon be starting a newsletter to keep up to date with my visuals and analysis work but don't want this to become a chore

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.

I've updated my wind curtailment dashboard to also include the average £/MWh price for both the wind turn-down as well as the (mostly) gas turn-up. This has been the missing metric to provide a more balanced view as recently the £/MWh has actually been lower even though total costs are higher.

Here's a close up view of the uncrewed XOCEAN vessels performing robotic surveys across the Dogger Bank wind farms. I've spent far too much time this weekend adding new features to my wind farm construction animations, you can see a couple of them here.

I've upgraded the Dogger Bank and Sofia wind farm construction timelapse, now with vessel labels and all sorts of other improvements! It's still very much a work in progress but I'm quite happy with the result so far, especially as this is (yet another) project I work on in my free time.

Some more on location testing of my Wind Farm Radar before I release it for anyone to have a play with 📡 This time during a lovely walk along the beach on the Wirral with no less than four offshore wind farms in view, plus numerous wind turbines scattered around Liverpool docks.

Experiments with a light-cycle style for the AIS vessel animation

Timelapse of all vessels constructing Dogger Bank and Sofia wind farms during November and December last year 🚢⚡ This is a sneak peak at an updated set of visuals that I'm working on to show the construction of these ginormous offshore wind farms from open water to full power.

Don’t believe everything you read online. Time for some honesty in the heat pump debate.

Enough BS (bad science) - here are the facts.

More super high-res weather visualisations are on the way… This is a visual of wind output and curtailment that I made last year, showing high resolution wind speeds using @meteomatics.com EURO1k data.

See live and historic curtailment and turn-up actions for all assets on the grid… As part of the recent upgrades to my GB Renewables Map the curtailment view now shows you all the assets that have either SO-flagged turn-down actions or any type of turn-up action.

I was interviewed by @chrisbaraniuk.com about my mini wind turbine "physical twin" as well as my live Ceefax for Wind Farms display. It's all part of his blog The Reengineer, packed full of other interviews and articles about the energy transition; well worth checking out if you haven't seen it.

Somehow this is on the front page of Hacker News 😅 It wasn't me who posted it! news.ycombinator.com/news

NEW: I spoke to @robhawkes.bsky.social about the miniature wind turbine he made. The blades spin to match the activity of a real British wind farm of his choice! What other interesting ways of visualising or representing energy system activity have you seen?? www.thereengineer.pro/p/i-built-a-...

It's here! All power assets are now live on my GB Renewables Map ⚡ That's right, it's not just wind farms any more. Now you can see live and historic data for gas power plants, nuclear, grid batteries, biomass, pumped hydro and even a bit of solar.

Did some on-location testing of my Wind Farm Radar at the weekend… Not that I doubted it worked, though that doesn't mean I wasn't surprised when it actually did work 😅

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Turns out the electricity transmission network looks pretty cool when animated in Blender ⚡ The idea is the animation shows flow direction along each line, though right now the directions are completely made up until I get my head around PyPSA.

Here's a sneaky peak the next release of the GB Renewables Map, or should I say the GB Not Just a Renewables Map… That's right, all types of power assets are coming to the map! Plus a whole bunch of other improvements.

Is it time to revisit this Dogger Bank visualisation? It's been just over two years since I made this animated time-lapse showing the construction of Dogger Bank A wind farm.

What if you could see live gas turn-up in England at the same time as wind, gas and battery curtailment in Scotland? That'd be kinda interesting right? I suppose it's a good job it's coming to my map, and soon…

What if it wasn't just wind assets you could see curtailed on my renewables map? 🤔 Maybe it should be a not-just-renewables map. I have a feeling we'll find out soon enough…

What if you could visualise how electricity flows from a wind farm in Scotland to your home in London? Ok it's not quite that simple, but it got me thinking that there must be a way of visualising the complexity of the electricity transmission grid in Great Britain. This is my first attempt…

Coming soon…

Time for something different, radar for wind farms… 📡 I've been working on a prototype that you can use on your phone to discover more about the wind farms around you.

Hmm, what's this about…

Transmission boundary constraints are now on the map! ⛔ I've finally got around to adding the NESO transmission boundaries to my renewables map, as well as the status of how constrained each boundary is. It's all based on the NESO day-ahead constraints data so it's more of a forecast.

Working on a new feature 🤫

The mini wind turbine isn't broken, I just updated it to show curtailment accurately… I've updated both the Ceefax for Wind Farms display as well as the mini wind turbine physical twin to properly account for curtailment due to transmission constraints.

Apparently I'm anti green *and* right wing now 🤷‍♂️ I'm still unsure how it's anti green pointing out that we burned gas replacing over 10% of all wind energy in 2025 due to transm. constraints. The wind was there, the demand was there. However the infrastructure was not. Show me where the lies are…

Wind farm turbines, inter-array cables and export cables are on the renewables map! 🙌 Massive thanks to @russ.garrett.co.uk for allowing me to use the amazing @openinframap.org data for this (which uses OpenStreetMap at its core), this saved me an immense amount of time and energy.

Wind roses are coming to the renewables map, and more! 🌹🏔️

If you don't have a 3D printed wind turbine whose rotation matches the speed of your favourite wind farm, then what are you waiting for?

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.

Most days my gas boiler works too, though it certainly didn't when it died on me for three weeks last year. Get your heat pump fixed, they work just fine 🤷‍♂️

Making progress…

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Tinkering…

We can argue potential costs for renewables indefinitely… The question few are asking (or prepared to answer) is do you agree that we should stop burning stuff for electricity generation? 🔥 If yes, then by how much? And when? And what is your plan to do that if it's not via "expensive" renewables?

I've moved the mini wind turbine into my office so it can sit in the background during calls… Turns out it's quite the distraction. "What's that?!" 😅 It's currently showing the live output at Gwynt y Mor wind farm just off the North Wales coast.