Robin Hawkes ⚡️

Do I need a reason to add a retro halftone print effect for Turbine Tycoon?

I've always loved the warm analogue style of mid-century printed media, particularly the retro-futuristic illustrations seen in Eagle magazine. It's an effect I've wanted to explore and apply to my work for a long time.

Animating Storm Amy in 1km resolution

The first named storm of the 2025/26 season, Storm Amy broke the UK's October low-pressure record.

The highest recorded gust was 96mph, though it's possible there were even higher gusts as a power outage knocked out the recording station.

This visualisation shows the wind speeds as the storm passes over the country, alongside the output from wind and gas power plants.

Genuinely excited about the plug-in solar news in the UK, I'll absolutely be doing this!

I've wanted solar for ages but I have a weird roof so the idea of experimenting with something simple in the garden or on the garage is very appealing.

Patiently awaiting more on exactly how this is going to work and when we'll be able to buy and plug these devices in 👀

What does it look like to build one of the world's largest offshore wind farms, one month at a time?

Each cell in the grid shows a full month of construction, using AIS data from Kpler to follow every single vessel as they go about the installation and commissioning of the giant 1.2GW wind farm.

Every time I play this I notice something new, like the methodical survey pattern on the right of the wind farm in April. Or the impact of bad weather causing the vessels to occasionally halt work.

Living near the sea has its perks

The beautiful data views in SimCity (2013) directly inspired my early data visualisation work and are partly responsible for me picking it up as a career.

It's now 13 years since that game was released.

Back in the year 2000, a 13-year-old me would have had to wait another 13 years to play it. That's a lot of thirteens…

It wasn't my favourite in the series — the online-only launch was a shambles — but it was arguably the most influential of the SimCity games for me personally.

RIP Maxis 😢

Uncovering the hidden patterns during the construction of Dogger Bank A, one of the world's largest offshore wind farms…

Like yesterday's animation, each cell in the grid shows a full month of construction, using AIS data from Kpler to follow every single vessel as they go about the installation and commissioning of the giant 1.2GW wind farm.

This time all vessel movement can be seen at once for each month, which suddenly shows all the hidden patterns and careful choreography.

"Grok is this true?"

It's terrifying how normal this has become.

Do we have first power at Dogger Bank B?

According to the balancing data we have 26MW of output today at Dogger Bank B, which will eventually have an installed capacity of 1.2GW.

This also implies two (out of 95) of the 13 MW Haliade-X wind turbines have been installed in recent weeks.

The data first appears on the morning of March 11th with 13MW of reported output, which also aligns with a single turbine being installed at the time.