This edition was -- thanks to some galaxy brain planning -- mostly penned in various Paris coffee shops before polishing it off on the TGV back to Zurich (it's a hard life). Carbon emissions aside, I'm most happy with our dispatch down analysis: why turn down wind generation in favour of imports? 🧐

Always better when @philipb-h.bsky.social is subbing but, of all the problems with Ireland's immigration system, an extended bit on returning emigrants' driving licenses (of all things) seems...cursory? Lots of hoopla regarding the recent R1 presenter shuffle, zero about *producers*. #SpeirGorm

Wondering if Switzerland's concept of oral contracts is behind such an easy switch in mobile phone providers. Spoke with a human for ~15m: they handle number transfer; SIM arrives today; a deal for the other half. Small chance I agreed to something silly, but our monthly bill drops by >100 CHF (!)

Although I really hate when mistakes like this happen, the couple of hours spent debugging usually highlights a bunch of possible improvements to our pipeline 🤷‍♂️ (Bluesky's a great way to share news in near-realtime, at the risk of occasional gun jumping like this - which we'll always correct).

*mentally steels himself for this to get literally no wider attention until, say, June 2026 when the Irish EPA (or a similar organisation - who do great work, but at very different speeds than we're used to) put out a press release* 🤷‍♂️ Our 500+ newsletter subscribers seem to appreciate it, though!

Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles—it's the Irish electric grid in September!

By an amazing coincidence, we happen to be in Dublin this week for Solar Ireland's annual conference. What a delight it was earlier today to pop into Eason's for a copy of the Irish Times and see Green Collective's name in print before boarding the #4 bus to the RDS 😊

Renewable generation this month is already so far ahead of any previous September month that it'll be a great report even if gas and oil pull ahead in the final stretch; and let's not forget the (very unexpected!) new battery *and* solar records that were set in the last couple of weeks.

This was often on the telly growing up but I'd never watched it properly until recently. Turns out it's really fun and has aged well! And: it was filmed on location all over New York City. I spotted a bunch of my old haunts; but this guy located every single shot!

Look closely at the treemap below and, yes, the two largest Irish solar farms are Gallanstown and Gillinstown, both in County Meath. This has definitely never caused any confusion, given the generally extremely high quality and careful curation of public Irish grid data.

Including a preview of our new unit-level treemaps of which there'll be much more in our upcoming monthly review! 📊

While we were all congratulating ourselves for hosting the best edition of The Traitors, the state chartered a flight to transport 20 people 6500km (11 hours). It's "value for money", apparently, unlike actually improving our asylum and/or visa processes in the slightest 🤦 #TraitorsIRL #SpeirGorm

Doubt I'll ever say this again, but missing Oliver Callan this week. He was pretty good on the first Traitors Uncloaked! Meanwhile, this morning's host thinks The Traitors showed we're basically a nice and decent people. Were we watching the same show? #TraitorsIRL

Traitors Ireland the first RTÉ show to make me fire up the VPN 🧑‍💻 What a representation of modern Ireland: cute hoors who remember keening at funerals; D4 chancers; blatant racism and sexism; survivors of direct provision; so much tea. And that ending. Show of the year! #TraitorsIRL

If I had a penny... 😆 (more seriously: I should probably worry about the day when someone *doesn't* ask this question)

It's still a joy to work on Green Collective's free daily updates. After five years, folks still get excited on the *really* windy days - and, increasingly, sunny days 😊

Looking back a couple of episodes, never resolved: WHO'S YOKIE?! #TraitorsIRL

On reflection, this was another way of saying: it's always a delight to be back in a huge, diverse metropolis and even brushing up against some of the fascists on Saturday didn't take too much from it. I was lucky to be able to mostly ignore them as -- hopefully -- will history.

Just some of the cuisines enjoyed during the latest week of eating and drinking my way through London: - 🇲🇲 - 🇸🇬 - 🇻🇳 - 🇱🇰 - 🇯🇵 - 🇨🇳 - 🇵🇭 - 🇩🇲 / 🇰🇳 - 🇬🇭 / 🇸🇳 / 🇳🇬 (and maybe others @ Akoko) - 🇮🇳 - 🇹🇭 - and some great 🇳🇱 beer on the Bermondsey Beer Mile 🇬🇧 represented by a sausage roll each morning!

As I learn more about it, I've been powering more and more of @greencollective.io's charts with "fancy" SQL queries. SQL still isn't *that* intuitive to me; because I'm relying on LLMs to help me learn it and/or craft queries (Gemini nailed this in one go) I'm genuinely curious whether it ever will.

I rarely make videos but I think this came out okay and it was a fun little Sunday afternoon pair-programming with Google Gemini which got me 99% of the way to a Bluesky downloader and was *absolutely invaluable* to crank out a bunch of imagemagick, GNU parallel, and ffmpeg sorcery.

It's the middle of the silly season and this is Zurich so this was also almost certainly the most expensive newspaper -- per page -- I've ever bought 😆 (6.80 CHF ~= 7.20 EUR; I love that that newspapers are still widely available here and did not move to Switzerland to save money)

EirGrid's continued tacit conflation of 1-min/15-min data is a real pet peeve of mine. Be consistent or -- better yet -- publish the highest resolution data (trust me, we can handle it 🤣). (@greencollective.io used to monitor some regions of the US where 5-min is the norm; 15-min seems so quaint!)

We've been iterating on the charts we share every single day on @greencollective.io's social media for almost five years now; the folks at @data.ft.com produced all these in - I think? - 24 hours 🤯 They're...good at what they do. Support real journalism, for real.

As a long-time FT Weekend reader, it was a real treat to have the newspaper reach out to *us* at @greencollective.io for data to support this article which goes deep on datacentres' continued use of fossil fuels 🏭 Seeing our company name in today's edition was definitely a moment to savour ☺️

Obviously it's good to see strong renewable generation even when winds are low...but we're very much reining in our enthusiasm with these posts because Ireland absolutely should not have (and is absolutely not equipped to deal with) temperatures like they had last week and over the weekend 😶

A lot of wind for a July day! 🍃

Our June newsletter is now free to all. If you'd like to receive "Irish Grid Monthly" on the 1st day of each month, subscribe today for free. www.greencollective.io/post/monthly...

Anyone else noticed that Bluesky posts with a link get *absolutely no* attention, or is it just us? Anyway, I might as well announce this huge, silent improvement to our public county-level dashboard. This is thanks to our ongoing migration to @motherduck.com/DuckDB. So far, it's going great!

This tour was really fun: I lived in central Dublin for years and years without ever seeing or virtually all of the stops on the route. It was also just very nice to finally be in Dublin to take advantage of one of @dublininquirer.com's and the Alternative Dublin Newsletter's recommendations! 🏳️‍🌈

Very happy with the latest newsletter from @greencollective.io which, as we allude to at the end, was written in the middle of a severe heatwave across Europe in one of the few (semi? maybe? we didn't ask...)-public air conditioned spaces in Zurich 🥵 Taking today off and trying to stay cool!

We're obsessive at the @greencollective.io about using the very latest numbers from each publisher as soon they're available, carefully aligning each timeseries with one another, and even (extremely carefully - takes a *lot* of time) correcting what can only be mistakes in primary sources 🕵️

Recently, I've been looking into the early days of electricity production in Ireland. It looks like the island has had - with the brief exception of roughly 1930-1932 when the new hydro plant at Ardnacrusha was able to meet all demand - a coal-burning plant of some kind since at least 1891.

With peak @theauldsthretch.bsky.social approaching, we're seeing new records in Irish solar: - a new one-day high yesterday of just over 8.1GWh, equal to about 7.4% of the island's electricity demand - a new high this morning of 859MW, equal to about 20% of the island's demand at the time ☀️🥇

I've been finding Gemini pretty excellent at spitting out moderately complex SQL queries like this that I'll probably only ever use once. Tell it your schema, *very* roughly what you want (no need to finesse the query), and it's usually 99% there. A moment or two in @motherduck.com and...done 🪄

Absolutely scarlet every time @feiwang.bsky.social has to deal with any Irish government department. The visa stuff, in particular, is basically why we settled in Switzerland rather than Ireland. Tiny violins for us, obviously, but multiply that a few 100x times and it's a real own goal by Ireland.

You gotta admit, that's commitment to the bit. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Product of a couple of days of footering about with CSS and refactoring our charts and panels. Usability aside, I'm most happy with the use of "statically-generated dynamic routes" (?) to implement clean/fast switching between panels.

Troubleshooting "apt upgrade" on a tiny Raspberry Pi clone running as a Tailscale exit node, via Google Gemini: - add these lines to this config file - no, create a "skip file" - no, chmod -x this hook - okay, here's how to nuke flash-kernel *and ensure it's never reinstalled* Got there in the end!

Turns out solar power is pretty handy, even in Ireland. Particularly with wind growth unfortunately pretty flat the past few years, expect to see more and more of this.

Our timeseries charts get very busy once you're trying to cram in a month's worth of data (inevitable when dealing with high daily periodicity?). So I spent some time on this new chart in advance of @greencollective.io's May newsletter. // TODO: fix captions in chartjs-chart-treemap

It was the greenest May month yet for Irish electricity. Find out more in our free newsletter, now available to all on our website. www.greencollective.io/post/monthly...

I want to have a soft spot for the few minutes each week of longer-form radio pieces in World Report but when it's helping Russell Padmore spew out the kind of rant against the London congestion charge that he'd never - I hope - get away with on the World Service... 🤮 #speirgorm #rte

Fine Bank Holiday weather! Yesterday, wind generation exceeded 4GW (about 95% of electricity demand at the time) for the first time in a June month, smashing the previous all-time high of 3.5GW set last year. Fossil fuels also dropped below 1GW last night; grid carbon intensity numbers to follow!

I want to have a soft spot for the few minutes each week of longer-form radio pieces in World Report but when it's helping Russell Padmore spew out the kind of rant against the London congestion charge that he'd never - I hope - get away with on the World Service... 🤮 #speirgorm #rte

Definitely going to try this with the next nuisance reply guy over on @greencollective.io. 🥔

A recent revisit to the city reminded me of this article; despite spending the 2010s exploring the bars of New York, I'd forgotten about the incentives introduced in 2014 and never consciously connected them with the abundance of city breweries there by 2020. www.goodbeerhunting.com/blog/2023/4/...

A breaking change to the EirGrid dashboard *while on holiday* has long been a worry - and it finally happened! I was able to sellotape things together over the weekend but I'll be sharing some...*thoughts* on EirGrid's "approach" to data transparency in the next @greencollective.io newsletter 🤦

No mention in "Business Events 2030" of making it easier to...actually get into Ireland? Yet the report highlights the 35th International Geographical Congress who warned potential attendees it can take *six weeks* to obtain an Irish visa. Based on my own experiences...only a slight exaggeration 🤦

Double and triple-checked the numbers this morning and I think it's right, so... 🤞