I've been trying to work out the electrical transmission loss expected between Whitelaw Brae and here near Oxford. Unknown of course and it will vary with time of day and what the pylons people call 'network constraints' meaning that the pylons somewhere are sometimes already at full power so it is time to change blade pitch and decrease windmill generation in the surplus region. I'm about 360 miles away on the England side. Transmission loss never shows in the £ calculations but I'm trying to balance my carbon dioxide budget, for which transmission loss is not excused by somebodies' financial hedging products.
Publishing exactly where there are or aren't plenty of really big pylons probably isn't the done thing, so I don't want to collect together a description here of deficiencies of the supergrid, some of which I already know about. But could somebody from National Grid report to somebody at Ripple an indication and forecast ? Only within national grid it is possible for their computer model at 1980's complexity to compute the power flow and a spline fit loss estimate which is adjusted a little for wind, temperature, rain, and so on, and in principle they probably could compute the loss between Whitelaw and my nearest supergrid substation, and in principle have that show on my Ripple dashboard along with a forecast. And similarly for every other Ripple user. It is a point to point differential loss calculation including every hop of pylons and every major substation transformer as far as dropping from EHV to HV at my nearest regional substation. National Grid won't know what goes on in a couple of hops of local route known to my DNO.
For example, years from now, of my "202 Watts(peak)" presently generating 121 Watts at Whitelaw, which is worth 114 Watts near Oxford". These are guess example figures only, but it is from at most the 114 that I should be calculating how much of a decrease to home consumption and carbon emissions I'm getting delivered to here before anyone starts helping with hedging finance and carbon certificates and stuff like those. I'm aiming for real zero CO_2 without hedging.