Energy Justice Community Map Blog

This video is a couple years old but is an excellent look at the Vulcan Project and its goal to measure all the CO2 emissions in the US.

How to Count ALL Human Carbon Emissions in the US

I've got heat maps working for operating coal, nuclear, gas, biomass, hydro, and municipal solid waste incinerators.

List of Heat Maps

I broke the lower 48 states in the US into around 700,000 grid squares. Roughly 3 x 3 mile.

You can see the heat map with the markers that link to more detailed facility information, or without them.

There are three different levels of color saturation which let you decide whether to show a map saturated with facilities, or a "points of light" view.

I integrated the coal heat map with google maps. I've got custom tiles (aka images) that you can overlay for zoom levels 0 to 8. At zoom 8, you can see the limits of our calculations (it would take a lot of time to calculate higher resolution).

I think this result is awesome!

http://www.energyjustice.net/map/server-test/tile-example.html

Note: the previous map had a different projection. Now we're using Google's projection.

This is a heat map of coal power plants in the US. It takes all the coal power plants and estimates their impact upon an area as being inversely proportional to the distance squared. For example, we assume that the impact of living 1 mile from a plant is four times worse than living 2 miles from it.

Resolution 0.05 degrees longitude by 0.05 degrees latitude.

In the future we're working to include power plant MW in the equation. And we plan to add these to our maps on tiles that will allow you to use them on Google Maps.

Google's Chrome browser has consistently been the fastest choice ever since it was released two years ago.

If you want to use Google Maps, or any other heavy-duty Javascript application - you should use Chrome. This is most obvious if you try mapping 100+ facilities, like all the coal plants in the US, or do something that shows 1000-2000 markers.

Safari is also a good choice for Mac users.

Opera is next in speed, however as it isn't as popular there are some websites that don't support it.

You can now add one or more fuels or products to a unit.

We have the list of fuels and products restricted based on unit type. So set the unit type first.

Giving the fuel a rank is important as it helps us figure out how to display the facility on our National and Community maps. We need to know things like whether it burns more coal than wood.

In other news, we've add photo captions. So upload a photo for yourself or your group and start adding captions!

There are many ways to get involved in this project.

Signup
Add yourself, your group (if you have one), and request control of any facilities that you are monitoring in your community. Join any relevant email lists that we have (biomass, nocoal, etc).

GIS Internships
If you are a student in college studying GIS, we can get you an internship.

State/Regional Organizers

We now have over 40 users! We are very happy to see people using the Community Map and giving us feedback on making it better.

Now you need to sign-up and login to see most of the people using it, as our default privacy setting hides you from the general public. So for all you lurkers out there, it's time to take the plunge!

Sourcewatch's project CoalSwarm has a massive amount of information about coal power that is essential reading.

I added links to their coal plant profile pages (over 700 links) and also to their State coal pages.

Most of our facilities data is from the US (probably 98-99%). However that might change. We are hoping to work with activists in other countries who want to map their facilities.

In the spirit of this, we've added a new non-United States National Map which you can access by choosing a Country from the homepage.

Country Examples
Canada
United Kingdom