Gridle

The Wordle game for energy nerds: https://gridle.bendnorman.com/

Each day you get a chart of one US state's electricity generation mix and five guesses to name the state. Wrong guesses tell you how far away the answer is and in which direction.

How this repo is organized

data/build_data.py   Python script that builds site/states.json from PUDL data
site/                The whole game: static HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no build step
  index.html         Page layout
  game.js            Picks the daily state, handles guesses, saves progress
  chart.js           Draws the stacked area chart as SVG
  style.css          Styles, including the fuel colors (light and dark mode)
  states.json        Generated data: yearly TWh by fuel for every state

Updating the data

The data comes from EIA Form 923 via PUDL. To rebuild it (for example, after a new year of data is released):

uv run data/build_data.py

uv installs the script's dependencies (pandas, pyarrow) on the fly. Downloads are cached in data/cache/; delete that folder to fetch fresh data.

To change how fuels are grouped, edit FUEL_GROUPS in build_data.py. If you add or rename a fuel, also add its label in site/chart.js (FUEL_LABELS) and its color in site/style.css (--fuel-<name>).

Deploying

The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which is connected to this GitHub repo and deploys site/ on every push to main (and a preview for each pull request). wrangler.jsonc tells Cloudflare which folder to serve. There's no build step; the files are served as-is.

Running locally

Any static file server works:

python -m http.server -d site

Then open http://localhost:8000. To preview a particular state's chart without affecting today's game, add ?state=XX, e.g. http://localhost:8000/?state=HI.

How the daily state is picked

game.js counts the days since 2022-06-14 (Gridle #1). The 51 states (including DC) are shuffled with a seeded random number generator once per 51-day cycle, so everyone gets the same state each day and no state repeats within a cycle. There is no schedule file to maintain.