A New National Energy Game is being made...
After releasing Energy Explorer just before the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off, I've returned full circle to national energy and what better timing than another energy-crisis.
The original Energy Explorer was based on historical electricity demand data. The new simulation will be based primarily on a slightly higher level of average energy use throughout the year. We need to get a rough sense of how much energy is needed and Professor David MacKay's work "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air" is a great starting point and source of inspiration for that.
Here's the progress so far on the new simulation:
This is showing an abstract view of the area of the UK as about 100 tiles, each of 35 km x 35 km squares (≈ 1250 km²) which allows you to see how much area of the UK you would need to take up with wind turbines and solar panels to reach the power levels needed to power the UK with our current population. Now I haven't checked these numbers but a rough first pass looks like this:
I'll update again once the prototype is live and I've validated this.