How would you like to be able to access data on all the power plants in the world and all of their performance metrics, analyze that data, and map it? Those abilities are part of the vision behind the Global Energy Observatory (GEO), an OpenModel website that serves as a wiki for global energy data.
Like Wikipedia, this enterprise uses wiki software that allows for the creation and editing of interlinked web pages by a collaborative community of users. GEO seeks to "promote an understanding, on a global scale, of the dynamics of change in energy systems, quantify emissions and their impacts, and accelerate the transition to carbon-neutral, environmentally benign energy systems while providing affordable energy to all." It is attempting to do so by using open source software tools, including Google Earth, and encouraging community participation. That’s where the power generation community comes in.
GEO’s databases are organized into three categories: GEOpower for power generation, GEOresources for fuels and resources, and GEOtransmission (under construction) for the transmission of electricity and fuels. The GEOpower database can account for coal, gas, geothermal, hydro, nuclear, oil, solar PV, solar thermal, waste, and wind plants of all sizes, though to date it includes mostly utility-scale plants for which public data are available.
The project was conceived and developed by Dr. Rajan Gupta, a fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a theoretical high energy physicist with wide-ranging research interests. It is sponsored by the New Mexico Consortium and has been built primarily by Gupta and four University of New Mexico electrical and computer engineering masters students.
A Virtual World of Information
Although GEOpower contains information on many power generation facilities around the world, the initial data have come from publicly available sources, so plant entries are necessarily incomplete. The GEO website explains that the project developed scripts to "scrape data available from open credible websites and publications in different formats (Excel, html, KML, pdf) into the database." Data for U.S. plants, for example, have been imported from Energy Information Administration and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sources. Gupta estimated that by the end of May, GEOpower included 40% to 50% of global power generation capacity.
The GEOpower home page includes links to tools that allow you to map data, view and edit data, add a plant, view the history of edits, download data, and analyze data. If you map all hydro plants in India, for example, you can click on any plant location to see capacity, and then click into the database for additional information.
Users must register and log in to edit and add data, use analysis tools, and download data so that the consortium representatives "can track and validate changes, and work with and acknowledge high quality users."
Because the majority of data included to date came from official sources, they are considered prevalidated. Gupta told POWER that when considering data from other sources, the system will be analogous to a peer review system used by scientific journals: "the editors and moderators in this system would be subject area experts."
Data analysis looks as if it could be very interesting when the database is more fully populated. The interface includes 25 performance metrics, from gigawatt-hours generated to NH3 (ammonia) emitted. Currently, data are typically limited to metrics tracked by regulatory agencies (for example, seven years of the EPA’s eGRID data for U.S. plants).
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