Home page User manual | v1.0 | 6 January 2019

This website visualizes post processed data on wind and solar energy data, as well as on heating and cooling demand for space heating. This web-page documents the user interface, as well as assumptions and visualizations. Box plots are used often, and we start with describing these. Next the main menus are summarized, and differences between PVGIS and Renewables.ninja visualizations are explained.

content:

Box plots explained
boxplot example

Figure 1. Box plot example

Box plots are credited to John W. Tuckey, which introduced this type of visual in 1969 to visualize the statistical properties of a data-set in a compact way. Figure 1 shows an example box plot, and the main properties can be summed up as:

Upper extremeMaximum value in the data set
Upper quartileThe level at which one quarter of the data set is higher, and the other three quarter lower, indicated as the top of the box
Arithmetic meanThe arithmetic mean of the data series, indicated with a dot
MedianThe level at which half of the data set is higher, and the other half lower, indicated with a line and a notch in the box
Lower quartileThe level at which three quarter of the data set is higher, and the other quarter lower, indicated as the bottom of the box
Lower extremeMinimum value in the data set

So, in the shown example 25% of the values are lower than 4 kWh and 25% of the values are bigger than 13 kWh. Half of the values are between 4 and 13 kWh. Shown data is daily wind power in January for years 2005-2015, for Belgium using the Renewables.ninja 1.1 data set.

Continent maps

The continent maps allow to select a location with post processed data. For PVGIS, six regions are covered and the maps show city locations, while the Renewables.ninja covers Europe and shows countries covered in version 1.1 of the data set.

The top level buttons allow to choose between following options:

Location names are shown in the English language. Since these can differ from local language, a link to OpenStreetMap in local location is provided in the Post processed data menu structure.

Data stats menus

Following conventions are used in the data visualizations:

Location drop-down menu: showing the name of the selected location

Stats drop-down menu:

Daily drop-down menu:

Loads drop-down menu:

since wind and solar have a different availability, this set of plots combines both energy sources for different demand scenarios. Five cases are shown, starting from 100% solar, incrementing wind in steps of 25% till 100% wind, for a constant peak power. First the mix of solar and wind is shown for a normalized combined peak power of 1 kWpeak; and next a power 10 kWpeak is assumed for the four load scenarios. 10 kWpeak corresponds to a peak capacity 240 kWh per day. Since load is not perfectly matched with generated power, both an energy surplus or deficit are possible.
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