Tag: energy

In reply to Natural Gas Prices and The Energy Market by Wouter Groeneveld

Well, yes, in the same predicament. Here in NL the energy prices usually are set two times each year (January and July), so our energy prices hadn’t changed yet until this month. That delayed the impact of the suddenly high wholesale prices of gas (and by extension electricity price as it is coupled to the gas price here). Our monthly advance rose by a third. A handful of smaller energy sellers went bust, but I never trusted them anyway. They’re all resellers betting on the price development in the wholesale market, which is something that can only go wrong over time. Price fighters lack resilience by virtue of their business model. This as the upside ends up in their profits, and the downside has a hard boundary where it starts disrupting deliveries. A few years ago we opted for a provider that is also a producer.

It seems that there’s a bit of a perfect storm. Stopping the exploitation of Groningen gas fields, the French nuclear energy production low due to repairs, German coal plants going offline last month, and Russia’s gas deliveries via Ukrainian pipelines stalling seemingly to pressure the speedy inauguration of the Nord Stream 2. Plus, and that is a strategic failure, the national strategic gas reserves not having been replenished and now at the lowest levels in years. The issue is a system level one, and you can hardly solve it at the household level. Also because the energy prices drive inflation in the cost of everything else you use and buy. Even if we had the money ready to spend to do something at home, or even if builders would be available to do the work, it would still only ever be a partial solution. So we’re riding the price hikes out this winter. A number of US tankers are on their way bringing gas to these shores, having changed course from their original Asian destinations, and having an immediate price impact (should war come to Ukraine, it would become a strategic US effort, not just a market movement).

One thing we did do is put the thermostat at a 2 degree lower night temperature, and 1 degree lower temperature during the day. That already makes a significant difference in our gas usage. Thus far temperatures have been relatively mild as well, so our usage is well below last year’s at this moment.

Anyone in the same predicament? Also just coughing up or building a plan of action? Let me know!

Wouter Groeneveld

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A while ago Peter wrote about energy security and how having a less reliable grid may actually be useful to energy security.

This the difference between having tightly coupled systems and loosely coupled systems. Loosely coupled systems can show more robustness because having failing parts will not break the whole. It also allows for more resilience that way, you can locally fix things that fell apart.

It may clash however with our current expectations of having electricity 24/7. Because of that expectation we don’t spend much time about being clever in our timing and usage of energy. A long time ago I provided training to a group of some 20 Iraqi water provision managers, as part of the rebuilding efforts after the US invasion of Iraq. They had all kinds of issues obviously, and often issues arising in parallel. What I remember connected to Peter’s post is how they described Iraqi citizens had adapted to the intermittent availability of electricity and water. How they made things work, at some level, by incorporating the intermittent availability of things into their routines. When there was no electricity they used water for cooling, and vice versa for instance. A few years ago at a Border Sessions conference in The Hague, one speaker talked about resilience and intermittent energy sources too. He mentioned the example that historically Dutch millers had dispensation of visiting church on Sundays if it was windy enough to mill.

The past few days in Dutch newspapers a discussion is taking place that some local solar energy plans can’t be implemented because the grid maintainers can’t deal with the inputs. Now this isn’t necessarily true, but more the framing that comes with the current always on macro-grid. Tellingly any mention of micro grids, or local storage is absent from that framing.

In a different discussion with Peter Rukavina and with Peter Bihr, it was mentioned that resilience is, and needs to be, rising on the list of design principles. It’s also the reason why resilience is one of three elements of agency in my networked agency thinking.


Power lines in Canada, photo Ian Muttoo, license CC BY SA

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Which energy data is available as open data in the Netherlands, asked Peter Rukavina. He wrote about postal codes on Prince Edward Island where he lives, and in the comments I mentioned that postal codes can be used to provide granular data on e.g. energy consumption, while still aggregated enough to not disclose personally identifiable data. This as I know he is interested in energy usage and production data.

He then asked:

What kind of energy consumption data do you have at a postal code level in NL? Are your energy utilities public bodies?
Our electricity provider, and our oil and propane companies are all private, and do not release consumption data; our water utility is public, but doesn’t release consumption data and is not subject (yet) to freedom of information laws.

Let’s provide some answers.

Postal codes

Dutch postal codes have the structure ‘1234 AB’, where 12 denotes a region, 1234 denotes a village or neighbourhood, and AB a street or a section of a street. This makes them very useful as geographic references in working with data. Our postal code begins with 3825, which places it in the Vathorst neighbourhood, as shown on this list. In the image below you see the postal code 3825 demarcated on Google maps.

Postal codes are both commercially available as well as open data. Commercially available is a full set. Available as open data are only those postal codes that are connected to addresses tied to physical buildings. This as the base register of all buildings and addresses are open data in the Netherlands, and that register includes postal codes. It means that e.g. postal codes tied to P.O. Boxes are not available as open data. In practice getting at postal codes as open data is still hard, as you need to extract them from the base register, and finding that base register for download is actually hard (or at least used to be, I haven’t checked back recently).

On Energy Utilities

All energy utilities used to be publicly owned, but have since been privatised. Upon privatisation all utilities were separated into energy providers and energy transporters, called network maintainers. The network maintainers are private entities, but are publicly owned. They maintain both electricity mains as well as gas mains. There are 7 such network maintainers of varying sizes in the Netherlands

(Source: Energielevernanciers.nl

The three biggest are Liander, Enexis and Stedin.
These network maintainers, although publicly owned, are not subject to Freedom of Information requests, nor subject to the law on Re-use of Government Information. Yet they do publish open data, and are open to data requests. Liander was the first one, and Enexis and Stedin both followed. The motivation for this is that they have a key role in the government goal of achieving full energy transition by 2050 (meaning no usage of gas for heating/cooking and fully CO2 neutral), and that they are key stakeholders in this area of high public interest.

Household Energy Usage Data

Open data is published by Liander, Enexis and Stedin, though not all publish the same type of data. All publish household level energy usage data aggregated to the level of 6 position postal codes (1234 AB), in addition to asset data (including sub soil cables etc) by Enexis and Stedin. The service areas of all 7 network maintainers are also open data. The network maintainers are also all open to additional data requests, e.g. for research purposes or for municipalities or housing associations looking for data to pan for energy saving projects. Liander indicated to me in a review for the European Commission (about potential changes to the EU public data re-use regulations), that they currently deny about 2/3 of data requests received, mostly because they are uncertain about which rules and contracts apply (they hold a large pool of data contributed by various stakeholders in the field, as well as all remotely read digital metering data). They are investigating how to improve on that respons rate.

Some postal code areas are small and contain only a few addresses. In such cases this may lead to personally identifiable data, which is not allowed. Liander, Stedin and I assume Enexis as well, solve this by aggregating the average energy usage of the small area with an adjacent area until the number of addresses is at least 10.

Our address falls in the service area of Stedin. The most recent data is that of January 1st 2018, containing the energy use for all of 2017. Searching for our postal code (which covers the entire street) in their most recent CSV file yields on lines 151.624 and 625:

click for full sizeclick to enlarge

The first line shows electricity usage (ELK), and says there are 33 households in the street, and the avarage yearly usage is 4599kWh. (We are below that at around 3700kWh / year, which is higher than we were used to in our previous home). The next line provides the data for gas usage (heating and cooking) “GAS”, which is 1280 m3 on average for the 33 connections. (We are slightly below that at 1200 m3).