Making Maps with Global Energy Monitor
Global Energy Monitor relaunched new beautiful maps of every major power-generating facility in the world. Earth Genome has been thrilled to work closely with GEM on design and implementation.
GEM collects fundamental data for understanding our global energy system. It’s amazing data. They track every type of energy production, from coal fired power plants to oil infrastructure to solar power facilities, and collect details including capacity, ownership and deployed technologies. Open knowledge is central to their approach. GEM started essentially as a wiki, and builds data from open sources ranging from satellites to Facebook, using every technique from imagery analysis to blood and sweat research. The results are used by so many researchers, including Climate TRACE who use the location and capacity information to target machine learning models for emissions estimates.
Such important data deserves a modern experience. When we started talking to GEM about updating their maps, we learned they wanted to retain the existing functionality but update with the look and feel that modern web tools enable. Priorities for GEM were to enable users to quickly explore tens of thousands of facilities, filter and search through facilities with ease, and quickly understand details. We refreshed the cartography, designed components with clear visual hierarchy, and developed intuitive user experience elements.
Just as important was ease of maintenance of the site. Taking inspiration from the storytelling template, every tracker is based on a simple common code base of static HTML/JS/CSS, with all configuration of cartography, filters and presentation details set by a JSON file. Creating a new tracker only involves creating a new configuration JSON file in a GitHub repository, along with a CSV or JSON with the facility data. The steps to update the data set for a map are forking the GitHub repository, trying out the new data file, then creating a pull request against the production repository.
Under the hood, we learned a few things in the implementation. For example, facilities that housed multiple units with different operational status needed pie charts on the map. Given the number of possible combinations, those are built dynamically using a canvas element, and it took some fine tuning to make the charts look good but also not overload the mapping library with too many custom icons.
And we’re excited by what could be next with GEM. As a wonderful coda for our work with GEM this round, we brought in our friends at Stamen to envision whole new experiences and designs, including integration of language models, timeline views, and easy data downloads.
Explore Global Energy Monitor’s new maps.
And if you have essential environmental and climate data that needs to connect with and inspire decision makers and implementers, Earth Genome would love to help. Get in touch!