It’s been a while since I posted about CurrentCost stuff, so time to share another little idea.
Last night I made a start on adding a new graph type to my CurrentCost application.
Instead of only displaying how much electricity you’ve used, the new graph displays the split of how that electricity was generated.
Realtime figures for the “energy mix” of ratios of different generation methods used in the UK National Grid are available in an XML feed that updates every five minutes.
Okay, I know I said I’d stop banging on about CurrentCost stuff… sorry. My next post will be about something different. Honest! 😉
But with talk about Home Camp 2009 starting to pick up, it seems like a good time to remember one of the interesting factoids I picked up at Home Camp last year.
As I wrote at the time:
…the frequency of the electricity you receive from the National Grid is proportional to the ratio of supply vs demand for electricity usage on a national level…
There was a lot of discussion about how this information could be used to make a difference.
This is discussed in more depth at dynamicdemand, but the sort of thing we talked about was how you could make a significant difference without reducing your total electricity usage at all, but by shifting your usage to times when national supply is greater than the demand, and so when the energy is cheaper and more efficient to produce.
As I wrote at the time, it might be interesting to see what this looks like plotted against your own personal electricity usage.
Demonstrating my lightning quick l33t development skills, only ten weeks later, I got round to trying it out. 🙂