PowerShaper Monitor launch! ⚡

Just to flag up that this has now been done as described: the Y scale is fixed when scrolling between periods using the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ arrow buttons unless the new data does not fit within the axis scale.

Thanks Richard,

Looking at it a couple of days ago it retained the same scale and made it easy to compare days. Although, I noticed that it did reach a spike it did appear to rescale and then retain the scale - going back over previous days. Today, it appears to be a bit more stable.

I’m just wondering whether it is possible to enable the user to optimise the scale having been told the highest spike and lowest reading. Perhaps in an Advanced settings area?

Also in the main area within the date/calendar it would be useful to show the day of the week. This would make it easier to see an usage pattern when scrolling through. For example, it may better identify any spike if the day is known particularly if Thursday is washing day and Tuesday is takeaway pizza night so oven usage is less or immersion heater is switched on - for Sunday night shower. Behaviour patterns will be clearer to associate with energy usage.

Peter Bates

I’m unable to access it because “computer says no” to the identifying code on my in house display. My in house display doesn’t work so I’m out of options on getting usage data at the moment

Yeah, I have the same problem, new build house with no home display… ;-(

From what I’ve heard, that’s a common problem. The developers may have a box of IHDs somewhere but each one needs to be paired to the correct meter and they probably don’t have a record of which is which.

The smart meter works perfectly well without the IHD but we mere humans sometimes find them useful. I actually have one I’ve never used but I take out the box occasionally to read the number needed to join some service or other.

Same. I’d be keen to add export data. Any advice welcome.

It didn’t accept my export MPAN (in the compatible meter check) and either way my export meter doesn’t have an IHD that I could supply a seriel number from.

I tried to add export to my Account and failed. I didn’t bother following it up, so have no advice in that area.

I would highly endorse the desirability of this simple addition to the main “View Data” page “Your smart meter data”. Any progress?

Might it be made possible to download one’s half-hourly carbon intensity, or emissions, data in the Settings option? We can download our half-hourly gas and electricity usage there. Our carbon emissions can be displayed in the ‘View’ option of the smart meter data app at https://app.powershaper.io/meters/, but not downloaded it seems from the Settings option, as the usage data can.
Preferably it would be the regional grid intensity or emissions for our own region that could be downloaded, but I believe you said in a webinar recently @mattfranklin that you had decided against using regional emissions data, and I wondered why that was.
It seems for example that in our own case, if we in the East Midlands convert now from gas to a heat pump, then, given that we have one of the highest average annual grid intensities in the country, our emissions will rise considerably. So we would presumably do best by the climate if we delayed in doing so. (Moreover, by delaying, as heat pump technology improves we would also have more choice of ones with lower CO2e refrigerants, so their whole life carbon would be lower, due to lower emissions as a result of leakage).

I’ve asked this before, but maybe it is possible now. @mattfranklin Is it possible to collect the data for electricity that is exported back to the Grid? I have a separate MPAN no. for export, so surely it should be possible collect the data in exactly the same way as importing. I’m on the Smart Export Guarantee rate. Although I have readings for export through the Feed-in–tariff meters, I now have a third Solar PV array that, of course, does not go through a FIT meter.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you both here @Paul_Hadfield @Peter_Bates. To some extent there are some big similarities between your question around exposing data which is not obviously accessible as the system currently exists. I have tried to respond to the questions specifically here:

  1. Carbon emissions in data download: I am not sure at the moment why this is not currently possible, and I definitely agree that it is something which I want to see. I will be speaking with our team soon to see how we can make some changes in this area as we have had some similar requests recently.
  2. Regional carbon intensity: I think this is something which we will want to revisit. I understand at the time of creating this we were slightly reluctant to use the regional carbon intensity figure since we didn’t feel it was reflective of the realities of how the grid works and domestic energy consumption. Specifically, the regional grid carbon intensity as I understand it, is based on the mix of generation and consumption sources within a given region, however by necessity certain regions are going to have a higher carbon intensity in part due to geography, which in a shared context does not necessarily mean people living in an area with higher carbon intensity are using more co2 per se. Whilst, the regional figures are important, the total energy use regardless of regional intensity in some ways may be more important. However as the service has developed and we have an increasing number of users and members from a variety of areas, it is definitely worth us re-assessing whether this is the best way to continue, and it may be possible to include both national and regional figures. Again, this is something which I will need to look into in more detail.
  3. Export data: we need to look into this more, @Peter_Bates, you may remember that I think you were our first user where we had ‘export’ as a possibility. This made it relatively difficult to test, and hard to justify much time and investment. However, this has changed, and we do have a few more users now reporting export data. With this in mind, we will take another look at this and see how straightforward it will be to expose this.

Sorry that none of these are definite answers. We have relatively limited capacity working on this at the moment, but with a number of new energy systems projects in the works we hope that it will be possible to pick up some of these issues soon.

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Thanks for these answers Matt. It is good to hear that we can hope for grid intensity figures in the future. Well, yes, as you say, it is all about geography, but where each of us lives is about geography too. As I understand it, the regions have their own well-defined CO2 intensity figures. Forecast figures for grid intensity by region for the coming two days ahead at any time are confidently published at https://carbonintensity.org.uk/ by a consortium of the National Grid and others, and an API is available, with a post-code lookup provided. Historic regional intensity data seems to be more elusive, but historic national data is readily available on the National Grid ESO website with a nice visualisation on their twitter feed. With the East Midlands having over three times the intensity of the north east, it seems that one of the best things those of us in this area could do would be to move to Newcastle (taking no coals with us).

Thanks Paul, carbonintensity.org.uk is where we currently get the national data, so from the data-source perspective it should be relatively straightforward to access the regional data.

I know you are joking about moving, but in a way that is one of the reasons we opted to display the national intensity figures, since regional data could be interpreted in that way, but obviously looking at it like that is not giving the whole picture!

Thanks, Matt, and indeed we probably won’t move house just for that reason. Nonetheless the inescapable fact seems to be that our average annual grid carbon intensity in the East Midlands looks as if it will be way above the gas carbon intensity of 227 gCO2e/kWh for some time ahead. On that basis, as far as I can see, given the current climate crisis, since I live where I do, I should keep my elderly gas boiler and possibly replace it with another instead of with a heat pump, if I want to do the best thing by the climate. That depends on how fast our grid intensity in this region comes down, and I haven’t yet found a forecast of future regional intensities fifteen years ahead (or even a dataset of historic regional intensities). Do you have access to anything of that sort I wonder? It is difficult to predict future intensities regionally, I appreciate, but BEIS may have looked at this I suppose.
Meanwhile can you, or anyone else, give us any clue as to what the rest of ‘the whole picture’, to which you refer, is? The facts seem straightforward to a layman as I am, but no doubt there is more to it as you suggest. Do you at HQ have any ideas as to what more is there to it?

I will see if we can put something together and get back to you on this, but I think it might make an interesting topic for a blog post. However, I will definitely need to do a bit more research myself to this end!

On a related topic - the different ways to look at CO2 intensity from an “average rate” versus “marginal rate” perspective. electricityMap – Marginal vs average: which one to use in practice?

electricityMap – Marginal vs average: which one to use in practice?
Meanwhile can you, or anyone else, give us any clue as to what the rest of ‘the whole picture’, to which you refer, is? The facts seem straightforward to a layman as I am, but no doubt there is more to it as you suggest. Do you at HQ have any ideas as to what more is there to it?
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I also think the difference between marginal rate of carbon and the average local generation rate goes in part to explain why using these regional grid intensity values may be misleading. For example many people argue that you should use the “marginal rate” when considering the carbon intensity of (say) plugging in your EV to charge. I don’t fully agree with this either (see ElectricityMap blog post previously attached) but lets imagine the scenario where you are in a region with a mix of nuclear power and wind (like NW England) then if you do plug in your EV some of the additional power needed will get pulled in from another region in order to top up the grid - this is essentially an inter-regional marginal rate issue.
The result is (and because UK grid is SO interconnected) that the national value for grid intensity is a very good starting point when trying to consider whether electricity is “green right now”. It would be great to have better regional tools for making those decisions but in my opinion the current regional grid values aren’t quite there yet.

Aah, most interesting Dom, and most illuminating. I shall stick with average intensities. Delighted to have had my attention drawn to this, many thanks.