Over the past few days, I’ve been working on a prototype dashboard that helps visualise wind energy curtailment across Scotland — using real half-hourly data published by NESO (National Energy System Operator). You can try the app here:
🔗 Scottish Wind Curtailment Dashboard
🔍 What the App Does
The app allows you to:
- Select any of 135 Scottish wind farms included in NESO’s curtailment data
- Explore curtailment over time — daily, weekly, or monthly — from 2023 onwards
- See total curtailed MWh for each wind farm
- Use an interactive map to locate wind farms geographically
It’s a fast, interactive way to start exploring where and when Scotland’s wind resources are being turned down — and how frequently.
⚙️ How It Was Built
NESO regularly publishes detailed half-hourly curtailment volumes for wind farms across the UK.
- Manually identified the Scottish wind farms from this data
- Found or verified geographic coordinates for each wind farm
- Created a custom Google My Maps overlay to display their locations
- Wrote a Python script to extract and aggregate only the Scottish curtailment data
- Used Streamlit to build a clean, interactive frontend with embedded charts and map
The dataset currently includes curtailment records from January 2023 onward, and NESO appears to publish new data daily, meaning this resource could easily be refreshed over time.
🧪 Why This Prototype?
This is very much an experimental prototype — designed to explore what’s possible with publicly available data.
Combining location-based visualisation with time-based curtailment charts creates opportunities for deeper insight. For example:
- Are certain high-curtailment farms located near transmission bottlenecks?
- Could new grid infrastructure, storage, or demand hubs reduce these inefficiencies?
- Are there seasonal patterns in curtailment that planners should account for?
Understanding curtailment spatially and temporally helps bring context to debates around system flexibility, market signals, and infrastructure priorities.
▶️ Demo Video
I’ve also recorded a short video showing how to navigate the app and what kinds of patterns you can uncover.
⚠️ Final Notes
This is not a finished product or official analysis — it’s a prototype for learning and exploration. Data comes from NESO, but the interpretations and visualisations are mine. The project is meant to prompt new ideas and conversations around wind energy efficiency and system balancing in Scotland.
