NREL and WorldWatch Offer "Big Picture" Tools for the Renewable Energy Community

Two organizations with long histories in the renewable energy industry have recently unveiled online tools that will help global and local communities analyze critical components of renewable energy development and ultimately make better decisions that impact the growth of renewable energy and the clean energy economy.

NREL’s Clean Energy Economy Gateway is a tool that offers a granular- or 30,000-foot-view of global renewable energy development.  The gateway uses Google Earth and real-time data to map clean energy economic activity and show how renewable energy development is an interplay between policy, market activity and technology development.

The clean energy gateway is a portal designed to be driven like Wikipedia.  Each organization enters its data and then has its own wiki page.  All of this renewable energy activity is then pulled into Google Earth and mapped though the Google Earth landscape and finally spit out into what NREL is calling the Clean Energy Landscape.

Alison Wise, senior strategic analyst in the commercialization & deployment center at NREL walked me through the gateway.  “We needed to find a way that would empower people to begin looking at these complexities on a regional basis,” she explained.  She said that the concept really turns on its head the statement, “think globally, act locally,” because it gives users the ability to see the renewable energy economic activity that is going on in their own local regions and see how their region measures up in the global context.

Wise feels that the gateway will bring the right stakeholders to the table for any particular region – venture capitalists, small-to-medium enterprises, local business leaders, congressional district reps, etc.

Since NREL wants the content to be user-driven but verifiable, when a company updates information about its projects or economic activity, it must be able to point to something on the web that proves the existence of the project, such as an article or news release written about it.

Wise explained that she hopes the gateway will shed more light on the “valley of death” that some technologies experience.  She said that many times researchers in the lab and decision-makers outside of it mistakenly believe that the valley of death (where projects get stuck because they have sound but not-yet-commercially-proven technology and no funding to move forward) can be remedied by better technology.  That’s not always the case, she said.  “The valley of death is actually a Petri dish of all of the complexities of policy, investments and development technology,” she explained, stating that it’s the Petri-dish elements that stakeholders often forget about.  The clean energy gateway, then, offers a way to understand that Petri dish of context, she said.

On the whole, the clean energy gateway is for regional leaders, such as regional economic development teams that are interested in bringing in new clean energy business or local business leaders that are already involved in the clean energy.  Wise sees political decision makers that want to get a better grasp of what is going on in their regions using the gateway as well as entrepreneurs that have an idea but want to see what their market could potentially be. 

Finally, Wise thinks members of the investment community that have some room in their portfolio for clean energy and want to get a better sense of what is taking place in a specific region will also benefit from the gateway.

The more folks use it, the more accurate and complete the tools will be.  Wise encourages everyone involved in the renewable energy community to check out the gateway and start adding content.

Screenshot from the Clean Energy Landscape.  Here RPS data is mapped as well as infrastructure and fueling stations and displayed through congressional districts.

Vital Signs Online

WorldWatch Institute has recently released Vital Signs Online, a portal of reports on trends in global development in all major industries including Energy and Transportation, Food and Agriculture, Environment and Climate, the Global Economy and Resources and Population and Society. 

Vital Signs Online is a web-based subscription system that offers researchers, developers and other interested stakeholders access to a vast array of research on trends that affect the global community complete with charts, graphs and text that is and downloadable manipulable.  According to WorldWatch Institute, “Vital Signs Online provides the same data-driven analysis as the Vital Signs publications, but with more online tools and resources, and updates from our research team as new data becomes available.”

Charts like this can easily be downloaded from Vital Signs Online.

The system is intended for use in strategic planning, understanding world events, or as a reference source for presentations and reports.

The organization says that the trends in Vital Signs Online include clear analysis and don’t omit the historical perspective. WorldWatch says its trends cover emerging hot topics—from global carbon emissions to green jobs—and that every trend includes full datasets and complete endnote referencing.

Trends will be available through a one-year unlimited subscription or on an individual basis. The price is $195 for a one-year subscription (nonprofit rate is $125) and individual trends are $19.95.

You can also sign up to get bi-weekly e-mail updates with a preview of each new trend as it is released.