Electricitymap-contrib: Add day/night-lines layer

[alixunderplatz]

The guys from https://www.flightradar24.com/ are using a layer to show day and night areas and dusk/dawn areas on the planet.

I think this is a nice feature to have (maybe optional with a checkbox) which will enhance the map and visualize relations of generation vs. daytime, consumption (incl. pumped storage) vs. daytime and PV output vs. daytime.

I don't know whether this is an implemented function in google maps or if they used an additional package from somewhere else.

What are your thoughts?

[brunolajoie]

I know it doesn't look perfect, but the sun layer is already supposed to do that. Plus its showing solar radiation after cloud cover, so better to compare it with PV output. Happy to discuss about improving the rendering though!

[corradio]

@alixunderplatz Why not. I think it adds complexity for relatively little value. But if you think it's very important and if someone has a bit of time to try it, let's by all means see what it looks like!

[alixunderplatz]

Some quick, sloppy overlays of both maps with the day/night lines (photoshop-level: over 9000 🤣):

Seriously, I like that areas with a "medium" potential are kind of translucent and high-insolation areas are yellowish.
I think my main "problem" with the solar potential is located in the lower part of the scale. Some areas covered in daylight may appear really dark. It's the range from 0 to ~50 W/m² which is not translucent enough to see the information on the map "hidden" behind it. Even areas with 200 W/m² may appear as black, although everything beyond ~20 W/m² already is starting to be "good enough" to generate some tiny bit of energy from PV.
Maybe in general, a dark grey as base color for 0 W/m² is helping, however this would collide a bit with the color of countries without data.
Wasn't there a blue-to-yellow scale in the past?

[corradio]

I definitely think we could rethink both the map colours (the top picture looks better than the bottom one) and the sun overlay colour scale.
I'm not really good at those things, but if we can find someone who can help, that'd be terrific.

[jarek]

Related to #802, and I saw that someone recently added timezone info to some of our zones.

[corradio]

Closing this due to inactivity (also we won't have time to work on it :/)