Premiums on electricity during Covid lockdowns in Italy

During Covid lockdowns, power companies in Italy charged premiums to cover increased prices for electricity, but it appears that isn’t the full story. For Bloomberg, Vernon Silver, Eric Fan, and Sam Dodge analyzed costs and premiums over time:

Even so, it’s clear – from executives’ celebratory comments during earnings calls as well as simple mathematics – that the dispatch market’s higher prices helped companies do far better than merely avoiding losses. In 2020 alone, dispatch premiums totaled €1.2 billion – or 238% more than companies would have received at the day-ahead price.

It looks like the power costs might partially be an excuse to charge more premiums. Maybe. Either way, I’m into the glowing aesthetic on the calendar heatmaps.

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Map of electric grid required for cleaner energy

To power the United States with more clean energy, you might think it’s just a matter of building more solar farms and wind turbines. But of course it’s more complicated. For The New York Times, Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer describe and map the challenges:

America’s fragmented electric grid, which was largely built to accommodate coal and gas plants, is becoming a major obstacle to efforts to fight climate change.

Tapping into the nation’s vast supplies of wind and solar energy would be one of the cheapest ways to cut the emissions that are dangerously heating the planet, studies have found. That would mean building thousands of wind turbines across the gusty Great Plains and acres of solar arrays across the South, creating clean, low-cost electricity to power homes, vehicles and factories.

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One home’s blackouts in Kyiv

Volodymyr Agafonkin and his family live in Kyiv, Ukraine. He visualized when the power went out over the past two months:

As you can see, we spend 4–8 hours in blackout during a typical day. You can notice some stepping patterns in the data — this is our energy workers trying to stabilize the blackouts into some kind of schedule, although it’s often overridden due to emergency shutdowns. More blackouts happen in the evening time because of the increased load on the grid, with everyone getting home after work and cooking dinner. There’s usually no need for blackouts at night because people go to sleep, and the load falls sharply — that’s usually the time for us to charge devices, turn on the washing machine & dishwasher, and occasionally bake something nice in the oven.

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Bitcoin power usage

You might have heard that Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. More than some countries. You might have wondered how that could be possible. The New York Times explains with a set of graphics and illustrations.

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Map of power outages

PowerOutage.US keeps a running tally of outages across the United States, and it’s looking bad for Texas. Millions of people in the state are without power, with temperatures in the teens. Scary.

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How your state makes electricity

The way we make electricity in America is changing. For The New York Times, Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer used ribbon charts, which I think are a NYT staple now, to show the shift between 2001 to 2019.

The width of each ribbon represents percentage of power produced by a source, and the vertical order shows highest percentage to lowest over time. Each state gets a chart and an explanation.

Wind power in Iowa, shown above, is up at 42 percent. Impressive.

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US electricity sources map

This interactive map from CarbonBrief shows how America generates electricity. Each circle represents a power source, color represents type, and size represents output.

See also a more edited version from The Washington Post a couple of years back.

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Darkness mapped in Puerto Rico

Three weeks in, much of Puerto Rico is still without power. Denise Lu and Chris Alcantara for The Washington Post map the lights at night, based on satellite composite data from NASA.

With more than 80 percent of the island’s 3.4 million people still without power, residents have relied on portable generators as workers across the island try to repair the damaged electrical grid.

In the days after Maria, many residents struggled to access gasoline, food, water, money and a cellphone signal to contact family members.

Painful.

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Power sources in each state

Power source in each state

In a clean and simple set of slope charts, Alyson Hurt for NPR shows the shifts in power sources — coal, gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, and renewables — from 2004 to 2014. As you might guess, coal power output is down in most states and natural gas is up. On a national scale, the hydroelectric and renewable sources need more time.

Grab the data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to look yourself.

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United States electricity map

Power capacity

The Washington Post mapped power plants in the United States by type and capacity in megawatts. Color indicates the former, and bubble size indicates the latter. There are a lot more natural gas power plants, supplying 30 percent of the nation's energy, than I expected.

See the article for a map for each type, along with a state-level breakdown.

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