ORKNEY'S ENERGY FUTURE
CURRENT ELECTRICITY DEMAND
INTRODUCTION
Hourly, daily and annual electricity profiles were generated for current electricity demand and for each sector. Annual demands provided a way to make a gross comparison between electricity demand and surplus electricity. However, the granularity of daily and hourly demand was required to assess the need for electricity storage, given the intermittency of the onshore wind electricity source.
This section will present the current electricity demand and the calculated electricity demands that could result from the decarbonisation of focus sectors Domestic Heating, Road Transport and Marine Transport. A proposed timeline of implementation will be presented along with capital and operating costs of the decarbonised technologies.
ORKNEY CURRENT DAILY ELECTRICITY DEMAND
To account for the electricity demand already in existence, a profile of current electricity demand was constructed. This is the demand before implementing new decarbonising measures suggested by this project – it accounts for the electricity currently used for commercial, industrial and domestic buildings and road transport. It was not possible to source daily electricity demand data for Orkney for a full year and so it had to be calculated.
Annual electricity demands for Scotland and Orkney were available from the UK Government [1]. Daily electricity demand for Scotland was available from the Scottish Government’s Scottish Energy Statistics Hub [2]. The methodology for building a daily electricity demand profile for Orkney was:
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Use UK Government data to calculate the percentage contribution of Orkney’s annual electricity consumption to the annual electricity consumption of Scotland (Table 1)
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Apply the percentage to the daily electricity demand for Scotland from the Scottish Energy Statistics Hub to obtain daily electricity demand for Orkney (Figure 1)
Table 1: Annual electricity consumption of Scotland and Orkney.
Figure 1: Orkney daily electricity demand calculated by multiplying Scotland daily electricity demand by 0.56%.
ORKNEY CURRENT HOURLY ELECTRICITY DEMAND
The calculated daily electricity demand for 2018 was chosen as a representative to calculate hourly electricity demand. The ReFLEX Energy Dashboard [3] has the hourly Orkney electricity demand recorded for 8 December 2020 to 6 January 2021 and this was used as a basis to calculate hourly electricity demand across the full year. The methodology for building an hourly electricity demand profile for Orkney was:
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Use ReFLEX dashboard to obtain hourly electricity demand for 4 days between 8 December 2020 and 6 January 2021 (multiple days were chosen to introduce variability; Figure 2)
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Calculate the percentage contribution of each hour to the daily electricity demand for each of the 4 days and calculate the average percentage contribution of each hour
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Apply average percentage contribution for each hour to the calculated daily electricity demand profile for 2018
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Cross-check calculated hourly demands with ReFLEX dashboard to ensure consistency
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Sum hourly demands and cross check against 0.56% (Table 1) of Scotland annual electricity consumption based on daily data from [2] to ensure match.
The result was an annual electricity demand of 157 GWh.
Figure 2: Orkney energy demand per hour taken from ReFLEX dashboard.
AVAILABLE DOWNLOADS
The spreadsheet with the calculations is available to download here.
REFERENCES
[1] UK Government, "Regional and local authority electricity consumption statistics," 22 December 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/regional-and-local-authority-electricity-consumption-statistics. [Accessed 18 February 2021].
[2] Scottish Energy Statistics Hub, "Daily Energy Demand," March 2021. [Online]. Available: https://scotland.shinyapps.io/Energy/?Section=SystemSecurity&Chart=DailyDemand. [Accessed 18 February 2021].
[3] ReFLEX, "Orkney Energy Dashboard," 6 January 2021. [Online]. Available: https://dashboard.reflexorkney.co.uk/admin/dashboard. [Accessed 18 February 2021].