I started writing this post a couple of years ago, but after spending a few hours getting the charts working for http://minuszeroeco.blogspot.jp/2013/12/when-did-we-turn-heating-on-last-year.html,
I ran out of time to write about it.
It was about that time when I started banging against my head in an apparent ceiling on the amount of data a google sheet could hold. This was big data, but not that big. Or maybe it's just the greedy way I set up excel files.
There is a new function in Google sheets now, called explore. A data bot goes in and looks at all your data, then plots graphs, scatter charts and histograms. It gives text descriptions of what is going on. I didn't need a computer to tell me that for every increase in generation of 10, "exported" increased by 10. But well done. This could have shown me a correlation that I didn't know about.
This graphs is really good though:
It looks like it's been made with a thick paint brush, that has then started running in a few places. The line hints at the sine wave of the orbit around the sun. The cosmos has conspired with the climate to produce this one.
The histogram of solar generation is interesting too.
