The goal of this repository is to analyze possible contributing factors to the energy price hike which could be observed in the autumn and winter months of 2021. Of course, there are many factors and it is impossible for me to inspect all of them in a single analysis. This work in particular focuses on visualizing the general trend in energy capacity, energy production, and specific events that could lead to such a drastic development. The events in question are:
- The possibility of "wind-draughts" leading to a significant decrease in energy production in regions that have a high percentage of on-grid wind capacity
- The influence of politically motivated price squeezes in the natural gas sector.
I base my analysis on multiple data sources. All of them are freely available and open for academic use. I am aware that there is some uncertainty in the data as the data sets include models as well as self-reports. At least for the inspected regions of interests in Europe there is the benefit of a rather well developed reporting infrastructure.
The IRENASTAT online tool offers data regarding
- on-grid energy capacity by country year and technology
- off-grid energy capacity by country year and technology
- on-grid energy production by country year and technology
- off-grid energy production by country year and technology
The agency offers data for all countries worldwide but I suspect that for under-serviced regions the disparity between factual values and reported values might be quite striking. For Europe I assume that the data is at least reliable enough for this analysis. I chose to include this data in particular because it is one of the few sources which has a granular depiction of energy capacity.
The OWID Energy Explorer is a data aggregation platform that focuses especially on changes in statistics related to energy. It is additionally enriched with additional information like carbon intensity, energy mix and GDP which makes it a powerful tool. The coverage is world wide. The data set is regularly updated but the the update intervals are irregular.
The ERA5 data set is a global hourly gridded data set containing climate data like temperature, precipitation and wind speeds. It is freely available both from the Copernicus Climate Data Platform as well as the AWS Open Data Repository.
The ENTSO-E Transparency Platform includes 42 electricity transmission system operators (TSOs) from 35 European countries and offers hourly data regarding transmission, day-ahead-pricing, generation, load, generation, and balancing. It is one of the richest and most granular data sources for the TSOs that regularly report their data. Unfortunately, that is not the case for some TSOs.
As mentioned before the included data sources don't have the same geographic and/or temporal resolution. The update frequency for most of the used data sources is very serviceable but there can be delays for rather recent dates.
Additionally, there is data available behind paywalls that would have been very useful in this analysis. The most interesting sources would be:
- European Energy Exchange Data (particularly Spot Market prices) as those price time series are very sensitive to changes in supply and demand
- Electricity Map Historic and Realtime Data includes data that not only looks at primary energy consumption but rather the energy mix of the actual energy consumption and its CO2 intensity corrected for trading/transmission behavior and outsourced industrial production in relation to national consumption.
The notebooks in this repository assume that they are run on the Pangeo environment in at HAKOM Time Series GmbH. At some times some calls to AWS S3 compatible storage providers might be targeting a local resource which is not available outside. If you are interested in the environment and its differences to a public Pangeo instance you can read this blog post. The resulting artifacts of this work should have no assumptions on resources that are not available to everyone.
I am currently still evaluating the data sources and building visualizations for my analysis. Currently all work is
done in the notebooks folder.
- General Location of European Offshore Windfarms
- General Location of European Offshore Windfarms
- Location of UK Wind Farms
- Location of Italian Wind Farms
- Location of Irish Wind Farms
- Location of Spanish Wind Farms
- Location of French Wind Farms
- Location of German Wind Farms
- Exchange Rates
- Natural Gas Future Prices
- Natural Gas Future Prices
- Coal Future Prices
- Crude Oil Prices