Robin Hawkes
@robhawkes
🐙 DataViz at @octopus.energy ⚡️ Obsessed with maps and energy ✨ Creator of ViziCities 👨💻 Previously Wood Mackenzie & devrel at Mozilla
Europe's electricity network as seen from space* *Sort of… The ISS edition of my experiments visualising energy data using Blender. What other countries would you like to see?
Northwest Europe's electricity network* visualised in Blender *mostly… What other countries would you like to see?
F***ing hell. Even if we take the NESO position that 60% of costs are related to thermal constraints (ie. Scotland boundary limits) that's still a metric shit load. We're already about to hit £1,000,000,000 in costs in 2026 so far, yes a billion…
Everything you see is visualised within Blender. Geometry Nodes is heavily used, meaning I have full control over terrain exaggeration, styling of energy infrastructure and all sorts of other things. And this is just the start… 👀 Data from OpenStreetMap and Mapterhorn
Britain's electricity network* *now in high-res with floofy clouds More experiments visualising energy data using Blender and Geometry Nodes
Wow that proposed Eastern Green Link 6 is quite the bootstrap! Somehow I hadn't heard about it until today, it's hard to find specifics on it.
Experimenting with a satellite imagery version… Not sure how I feel about it yet but I can see a few cases where it'd be handy.
Totally normal things to be doing to keep your reliable baseload power… reliable 💥
It's a fully 3D environment, meaning you can rotate it and move around as much as you want. The terrain is generated fully within Blender, meaning I have full control over its exaggeration, styling, and all sorts of fun things I won't spoil just yet 👀 More soon…
Britain's electricity network* *mostly… This is an experiment I'm working on to visualise energy data using Blender and Geometry Nodes
Project Hail Mary and The Girl With All The Gifts were the other standouts so far this year
Highlights have been the Bobiverse series as well as the Dungeon Crawler Carl series 🚀💣 Both of which have real pretty hardbacks.
This year has been a good one for reading so far… Some decent momentum too, well ahead of where I was this time last year.
Blackout warnings in Hungary, triggered by an outage on a gas plant and the shutdown of a nuclear plant due to low water levels. Damn that intermittent power…
Turns out other types of power generation also don't enjoy extreme weather events…
It's a good job the intermittent price of gas doesn't directly impact electricity prices…
Twice the output for nearly half the number of wind turbines… This is exactly why re-powering is such an important tool for levelling-up the renewable assets we already have. I'm very curious to dig into the plans once they are published later in the week. www.scottishpower.com/w/plans-to-r...
"Ditch Net Zero"? Only 9 months ago you claimed Octopus were the ones being anti-Net Zero. What happened Dale?
Obvious perhaps but also kinda fascinating how the breaks in a football match can have a massive impact on instantaneous demand www.neso.energy/news/neso-re...
I'm hiring 👀🐙⚡ This is a rare opportunity to join the Data Visualisation team at Octopus Energy, the largest (and most exciting) energy supplier in Britain. jobs.lever.co/octoenergy/b...
The second example is another type that I often stumble across, confidently telling a story about something interesting but when you scratch the surface it all starts to crumble apart.
AI slop has finally made it's way to energy… To be fair we reached that point a while ago but wow has it got bad lately. A particular favourite has to be this bizarrely-proportioned map of Britain that claims to show the TNUoS demand zones that "exactly align with the country's 14 DNO regions"
Can anyone help me get grid inertia and voltage data for my public energy map? One of the critical missing pieces from the map is how to show more about the why behind what's causing various actions on the grid.
Net zero pumped hydro? The last one we built was in 1984, long before net zero was a thing. That's also before we had wind or solar farms on the grid. Pumped hydro is just a great method of energy storage and resiliancy that we should have on the grid regardless of what you think about net zero…
Annnnnd back to the usual constraints and turn down in Scotland… Balance has been restored. These are all assets that are either being turned down in Scotland due to transmission constraints, or turned up in England to replace that lost energy as we still need it.