US Curtailment Tracker

Live at curtailment-tracker.kardashevlabs.org · Part of Kardashev Labs

How much solar and wind energy is being thrown away every day, by ISO. Curtailment signals where the grid is congested and where battery storage is needed.

Architecture

This repo is the frontend only. Data ingestion lives in kardashev-data, which fetches daily curtailment numbers from each ISO and serves them via a public API.

ISO reports → kardashev-data (ingest + Postgres + API)
                     ↓
        data.kardashevlabs.org/curtailment
                     ↓
        Next.js dashboard (this repo)

The dashboard server-renders on every request and pulls everything it needs in two API calls: /curtailment/summary and /curtailment?days=90.

ISOs covered

ISO	Region	Solar	Wind
CAISO	California	✓	✓
SPP	Southwest Power Pool	—	✓

More ISOs coming. PRs welcome. New ISOs added upstream in kardashev-data show up here automatically.

ERCOT has display metadata wired up in the dashboard (web/app/page.tsx ISO_META) but isn't live: real ERCOT curtailment data requires DUNS-gated MIS credentials, and public dashboard numbers aren't accurate enough to serve. It'll start showing up automatically once kardashev-data ingests a real source.

Data sources

• CAISO: OASIS ENE_SLRS report (Statewide Lost Renewable Statistics)
• SPP: Wind curtailment derived from SPP market reports

Fetched daily by kardashev-data after each ISO finalizes previous-day data.

Stack

• Frontend: Next.js 15, React 19, Tailwind CSS v4, Recharts, Framer Motion
• Data: kardashev-data API
• Infra: Docker (standalone Next.js image)

Local development

cd web
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000. By default the app reads from the public API at data.kardashevlabs.org; point it elsewhere with:

Variable	Default	Purpose
KARDASHEV_API_URL	https://data.kardashevlabs.org	Base URL of the kardashev-data API

Or run the containerized build:

docker compose up --build

What is curtailment?

Curtailment is when grid operators tell solar or wind generators to produce less than they could, because there's more electricity than the grid can absorb. It's wasted clean energy. High curtailment signals congested transmission, insufficient storage, or a mismatch between when generation peaks and when demand peaks (the duck curve problem).

CAISO leads the US in solar curtailment. In 2023, California curtailed over 2.4 million MWh of solar, enough to power ~400,000 homes for a year. SPP leads in wind curtailment across the Great Plains.

License

MIT · github.com/kardashev-lab