Introduction
This project aims to provide a free, open-source, and transparent way to collect electricity data.
We fetch the raw data from public, free, and official sources. They include official government and transmission system operators' data. This data powers the Electricity Maps platform, which includes our flow-tracing algorithm, estimation models, forecast engine and much more.
View it online app.electricitymaps.com, or download the app on Google Play or the App store.
Contributing
Electricity Maps collection of parsers is a community project and we welcome contributions from anyone!
We are always looking for help to build parsers for new countries, fix broken parsers, improve accuracy of data sources, discuss new potential data sources, update region capacities, and much more.
Read our contribution guidelines to get started.
Community & Support
Use these channels to be part of the community, ask for help while using Electricity Maps, or just learn more about what's going on:
License
This repository is licensed under GNU-AGPLv3 since v1.5.0, find our license here. Contributions prior to commit cb9664f were licensed under MIT license
Frequently asked questions
Where does the data come from?
The data comes from many different sources. But we strive to only use official sources from governments, TSOs, producers and online OpenData platforms when available.
Why do you calculate the carbon intensity of consumption?
In short, citizens should not be responsible for the emissions associated with all the products they export, but only for what they consume.
Consumption-based accounting (CBA) is a very important aspect of climate policy and allows assigning responsibility to consumers instead of producers.
Furthermore, this method is robust to governments relocating dirty production to neighboring countries in order to green their image while still importing from it.
You can read more in our blog post here.
Why don't you show emissions per capita?
A country that has few inhabitants but a lot of factories will appear high on CO2/capita.
This means you can "trick" the numbers by moving your factory abroad and import the produced good instead of the electricity itself.
That country now has a low CO2/capita number because we only count CO2 for electricity (not for imported/exported goods).
The CO2/capita metric, by involving the size of the population, and by not integrating all CO2 emission sources, is thus an incomplete metric.
CO2 intensity on the other hand only describes where is the best place to put that factory (and when it is best to use electricity), enabling proper decisions.
CO2 emission factors look high — what do they cover exactly?
The carbon intensity of each type of power plant takes into account emissions arising from the whole life cycle of the plant (construction, fuel production, operational emissions and decommissioning). Read more on the Emissions Factor methodology section.
How can I get access to the API?
All this and more can be found here.
You can also visit our data portal to download historical datasets.
Is the map frontend open source?
In the past, the map frontend was open source, but we have since rewritten the app completely and moved it to our own platform in order to expand the available features and provide a consistent user experience across our product offerings.
