Computer Laboratory

Introduction

Sankey Diagrams

Tree Map Diagrams

File Formats

Recoverying Grid Carbon Intensity Data

The carbon intensity files produced in the Computer Lab use fuel mix information produced by Elexon. (This is not really part of Joule and you are free to produce your own carbon intensity files as long as they adhere to the format described here.)

The Elexon site is scraped every hour to obtain the recent fuel mix used by the grid. This only finds the last few hours of of fuel mix information. If for any reason data gets out of sync (and you are a member of the building group on the unix systems in the Computer Lab) it can be recovered as follows:

Download the ELEXON csv file which contains an up-to-date record of the fuel type usage by the national grid:

  • Navigate to https://www.elexonportal.co.uk
  • Log in at the side (It is free to register for an account) Accept cookies!
  • On the right-hand side of the screen, click on `Operational Data'
  • Click on `Generation by Fuel Type - Historic HH'
  • Select the relevant year, click `add to basket'.
  • On the right-hand sidebar, click `my download basket'
  • Click `download basket contents'.

    • Place the downloaded file in the directory /usr/groups/building/meters.cl.cam.ac.uk/carbon

    Run ./elexon-converter < downloaded.csv > scraped-carbon-YYYY

    Run ./carbonCsvToJSON < scraped-carbon-YYYY > CarbonIntYYYY.json

    The cron job should run within the hour and will keep the current year's file up to date.