The Department for Energy and Climate Change provide a downloadable dataset detailing renewable energy planning applications. This provides information on the technology, location, capacity, state of application and the date when the site first generated power (and others). The dataset is well maintained and very clean. This means that is can be loaded into ArcGIS and analysed with minimal cleaning, something that is not true of many datasets. The temporal element of the dataset allows a look at how the installed renewable capacity in GB has evolved over the last 60 years. There are some interesting results shown in the video below. Please change the resolution of the video, youtube does not allow the automation of thison wordpress.

The earliest renewable supply is provided by hydro as early as 1909 in the form of Kinlochleven Hydro Power Station. This stands in splendid isolation until 1950, showing how forward thinking it must have been. During the 1950’s and 60’s lots of hydro power stations are built in Scotland. Then, from 1970 – 1990 NOTHING! This is despite the huge increases in gas an oil prices in the 1970’s, it may be that hydro capacity was sufficient to provide short term dispatchable demand matching. The early 1990’s sees the first wind farms and waste plants being built, alongside a single biomass plant. All of these are very small capacity. Sewage and landfill gas prove popular through the rest of the decade, with most being built in central England. 2002 sees the first solar plant, well done Forest Gate Community School! It is worth noting that there are almost definitely generators not in the database, although it is likely that any applying for grid connection and feed in tariffs would be registered. Wind capacity increases throughout the 2000’s and there are more waste and solar plants being built. This decade also sees the first wave and tidal generators. Then in the last few years solar and wind far exceed the other technologies. All of the solar plants are small and most probably the result of subsidies and the feed in tariff. Wind sites multiply and increase in size, especially offshore. The rapid expansion in capacity in the last few years is positive. Unfortunately however the most revealing pattern form this map is the complete lack of investment in clean energy for a long time, something that we are all paying for now and will be for sometime. Also the effect that policy and subsidy can have with the very rapid expansion of capacity in a short amount of time.

The temporal capabilities of ArcGIS have advantages and disadvantages. The interface allows lots of essential things to be altered very easily, such as frame rate (or video length), timesteps and temporal extents. It is also easy to set the time element for multiple layers, although it takes more time than it would with code if there are lots of them. The ability to set a start and end date is also useful as those sites which were decommissioned can be removed. On the negative side there are issues with the difference between the data and layout view, the image can be set up nicely in one then look very different in the other. This is propagated into the output as the animation is saved as a screen view. This also means that any extra frames etc. have to be removed from the layout view and any dotted lines need to be removed. This is a pretty massive flaw. It is much better exporting from the data view but adding legends etc. requires a lot more work that way. The quality of the output is also quite poor when using the standard settings so it is necessary to select the right codec etc. some of which don’t work very well. In the end it was easier to export as images and animate using Blender, although even this took somemessing around to ensure the correct number of frames, especially at the end of the sequence. This takes away from the point of using ArcGIS for animating a map, which ought to be the fact that it is user friendly. It is a reasonable option however, especially for those or don’t want to have to program everything themselves, especially as almost all of the settings needed are familiar to most GIS users.