Also got annoyed by this, but worked out pretty quickly that if you hold down right click and drag then you can change the angle

Don't get angry so much over minor things, your older self will thank you. Somebody did something for free, gave it to you for free, and so they did not do a perfect job. There are worse things in life.

You can also change the perspective by simultaneously holding the Ctrl key and moving the mouse.

if it wasn't for France having primarily used nuclear power decades ago, Europe as a whole would be in a much much worse state when it comes to CO2 emissions. That makes it abundantly clear that nuclear needs to be a part of the mix when it comes to non-emission generating energy production.

two different things; electricitymaps.com is a much more macro view, nice for looking at inter-country flows, whereas this one is great for looking at individual generation points and flows

Copper Sushi doesn't load for me, but I'm wondering how it is going to beat the awesome electricitymaps. They have all the data and quite a good viewer.

For completeness - that's just one grid included in this viz, for the map of the different european grids see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

(Russia is another big chunk of Europe but not included in the above map, though I think it may be the same grid with the Baltics)

For the question, measuring the flow of electricity is just normal power engineering, your home electricity meter does it as well. It's not so much the countries doing it though.

You can measure the flow of power by calculating the vector product of the current and voltage in the power line. EEVblog has a very good explanation video how this is done in an (analog) domestic watt-hour meter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_3DXcB9-xE

By measuring current flows across the wires.

There are five synchronous areas in Europe, the largest one being the synchronous grid of continental Europe [1].

Each national grids has interconnections with other grids and you can measure the flow of power through these interconnections to know who is sending electricity or getting electricity from neighbours.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

Do you mean, for example, that the UK is importing energy from France, but where are they importing it from?

It's a fair question. Energy charts has both the physical flows and trading charts for Germany.

E.g. trading https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

Physical flows https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

And it's not the same, so sometimes there is just "transit", although transit here should I guess be understood very loosely. I also assume they just know who paid for what.

Edit: although upon re-reading I think you probably asked something else. Sorry in that case.

You don't. You guess based on generation, consumption and where the power lines are hooked up.

If you are a regular HN reader who is (or was until this post) unfamiliar with Back to the Future, I'd love to know three more random facts about your life. In my world view, you are part of a fascinatingly small group of people.

I’d love to normalise pronouncing gigabyte as jigabyte

I thought they mean "jiggawatts" in the movie, i.e. more than bazzillion watts. Where do people pronounce gigawatts like that?

Heating and transport are the easiest in that regard. Most trucks drive during the day have the driver resting during the night. At night there's little demand, but wind and nuclear continue generating, so from a grid standpoint that's the perfect time to charge all the trucks. Cars can similarly be mostly charged during the night, as that's when they are at home. Heat demand is more variable, but heat is much easier to store than electricity itself. Everyone with a boiler already has a heat store at home. If you make the boiler a bit larger you can configure it to only heat when there's excess electricity (typically the night or at peak solar power around noon). And that's before you start with more efficient heat storage devices, like heating sand instead of water.

All of those solutions require infrastructure investments and smarter grids (likely with real-time pricing to incentivize consumers to use power when there's an excess, and an API so devices like chargers and boilers can act on this information without user input). But they don't require power storage at the grid level.

A map is not a territory.

Thats why the more decentralized the more resilient. No single point of failure, redundancy in routing. Ahh, yes. just like the internet used to be :-)

If the Russians don't already have agents in most major power companies their intelligence service is slacking