In the last year I’ve been building up a list of websites that help understand how electrical energy is produced in the UK and how it feeds into the grid. Building this understanding seems to be a vital requirement to understand the nature of the investment we need to make in the UK’s energy infrastructure and also massive potential that we are still failing to tap into.

But the other thing I’ve learned is that a lot of ideas that I grew up with around energy are probably no longer true. In particular the nature of solar energy, which while quiet and passive is steadily becoming a key part of the country’s energy infrastructure. This means that often there is more cheap renewable electricity in the middle of the day so it makes sense to run things like washing machines in the afternoon. This is a totally different paradigm from the one I grew up with where the cheapest costs were always at night when demand was lowest.

The demand curve is still true but I think this now illustrates the problem of storage and release. If wind energy is available all through the night when demand is low we need to be able to store this more effectively than we do now (if we store it at all, which is something I’m still trying to understand).

I’m really grateful to the creators of the following tools for their efforts in creating such helpful visualisations and utilities and for the creation of the underlying APIs that allow such projects to exist.

• When should I run… my electrical appliances
• National Grid Live explains exactly what the energy composition of the National Grid is and also does a good job around explaining inter-connectors and illustrating their use
• Renewable energy generation map shows where the wind is and how much energy individual windfarms are generating