Throughout the day yesterday I was glued to my phone reloading the “how much of Prince Edward Island’s electricity is coming from the wind?” gauge as the percentage grew from 0% the day before to almost — almost — 100% at 8:30 p.m. yesterday evening.
For that brief period last night there was 96.47% of the Island’s electricity needs being generated from the wind: 154 MW of the Island’s theoretical maximum of 173 MW of wind energy.
If I every had an doubts about the power of open energy data to motivate and change behaviours, I had only to look at myself yesterday, and the sense of provincial pride that would allow such a thing to happen (yes, I know that perhaps excitement-over-wind-energy-generation might not be a universal trait, but still…). My immediate reaction was thinking “we all need to run home and turn off the oven and the clothes dryer and get ourselves over the top!”
Wind is fleeting, so as I type we’re down to 35% (which, 10 years ago, would seemed like an impossible miracle in itself). But what a day.
Comments
Not that it isn’t great, but there was a power outage yesterday evening for the Eastern end of the Island. Not sure if that would have any effect on your numbers. The odd thing is that the chart doesn’t seem to show any large spikes.
It’s not just you. I was surprised how interested and excited I was by this data. It didn’t hurt that it was crazy windy yesterday.
Some rain on the 96% parade indeed — looking at the on-island load datastream I do indeed see a dip in load simultaneous with the increase in percentage-generated-by-wind:
<img alt=”” src=”http://media.ruk.ca/images//po…” style=”width: 641px; height: 253px; “/>
So the percentage was certainly helped along by the dip in load resulting from the power outage.
The clear answer to our secure energy future, thus, is to jettison Eastern PEI ;-)