Heat and load, Las Vegas
What the valley is drawing from the grid right now, what Nevada Power predicted yesterday that it would draw, and the desert temperature that decides both. Hourly data from the US Energy Information Administration and Open-Meteo.
- Temperature
- —°F
- Feels like
- —°F
- Power demand
- —MW
- Day-ahead miss
- —MW
Electricity demand
Nevada Power's balancing authority — Las Vegas and most of southern Nevada. Solid is metered demand; dashed is the forecast they filed a day ahead, which runs on past the present into tomorrow.
Temperature
The same window, so the two line up hour for hour. Dashed is forecast. In a desert city the load curve is mostly this curve, delayed.
How wrong the forecast was
Metered demand minus the day-ahead forecast, hour by hour. Above the line they under-called it; below, they over-bought.
Is the grid following the weather?
Working it out…
Where this comes from. Demand and the day-ahead forecast come from the EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor, which publishes what every US balancing authority files. Temperature comes from Open-Meteo. Both are fetched by your browser straight from the source: no key, no server of mine in between, nothing stored. Because the requests go directly, those two see them, the same way they would if you opened their sites.
Why Nevada Power and not the whole country. The national totals are sums over sixty-odd balancing authorities, and the last hours of the national forecast collapse toward zero because only some of them have filed yet. A single authority has no such seam, and it happens to be the one that keeps the lights on where I live.
What it is not. Metered demand is not the same as generation, and the gap between the two is imports, which southern Nevada relies on. Nothing here is a price, a bill, or a prediction of either.