About Us

This project was conceived and developed by Rajan Gupta. Dr. Gupta is a fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory and leader of the Elementary Particles and Field Theory Group. The implementation of the database and web interface was done in collaboration with Monika Bittman, Linn Collins, David Daniel, Fernando Gonzalez, Parthiban Jayabal, Katherine Norskog, Ratheeshprabhu Rajendran, Harihar Shankar. A much larger and growing group of collaborators(Chaouki Abdallah, Luis Bettencourt, Aimee Blanchard, Brian Bush, Gregory Heileman, Ramiro Jordan, Stanley Klein, Michael Ranney, Bernard Sadoulet, Steen Rasmussen, Pieter Swart, Donald Thompson, Marc Witkowski, David Zilberman, and Hans Ziock), have a deep interest in global development and in the energy and environment challenge. Their belief that complex systems, that are driven by highly leveraged social, political, economic, environmental, technology and resource availability factors, require informed public participation for transformational change lead them to support this site and data base. Their hope is that open source information and analysis will lead to informed discussion that will result in responsible action. Their goal is to help accelerate all three aspects of the global energy challenge

• Access to affordable energy by the global population,
• Moving our energy systems to carbon neutral ones, and
• Achieving these in environmentally responsible and economically viable ways.

New Mexico Consortium

The New Mexico Consortium carries out research and education in the public interest: we seek to integrate the strengths of New Mexico's research universities and build strategic connections with scientific institutions throughout the world.

Background

Access to cheap carbon-neutral energy is essential for human development, management of the environment, and for sustaining modern industrial societies. Along with clean water, health care and education, the need for environmentally friendly carbon neutral energy that all peoples of the world can access is urgent. The existing energy infrastructure is enormous and extremely complex. Information on it is fragmented, incomplete, conflicting and often proprietary. Even as trained scientists we have found it very difficult to get our arms around the challenges, much less develop strategies for enlarging the current energy systems in environmentally responsible and carbon neutral ways. As a first step towards better understanding of the challenges facing us we are providing geo-spatially referenced information on the current system. Our goal is to to carry out analyses of possible scenarios for development by engaging the experts and the public simultaneously.

Strategy

The first step towards these goals is to appreciate how vast and complex the existing energy infrastructure is, and to understand how it works. We believe that, today, this herculean task is possible using the fast evolving open software tools (like Google, Google Earth, Web 2.0, Wikipedia, etc.) and a community effort.

This site represents our efforts to collect, collate and organize the vast amount of information available through open sources and to provide it to the global population as an open platform for fostering discussion and development.

We believe that to transition a system as complex as the coupled energy, water, environment and climate systems, each of which have multiple social, political, economic, resource and technology drivers, to a carbon-neutral, environmentally responsible one requires millions of people thinking and making contributions.

Education and Outreach

A major focus of this effort is educational. To facilitate this we are making all the data available so that anyone with access to the internet can view, edit and enhance existing data stored in a MySQL database. We are particularly interested in working with high schools and colleges to build a curriculum on energy systems using these data and tools. Model projects are being developed in collaboration with a number of Universities:

• Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley: Profs. Michael Ranney, Stanley Klein, Bernard Sadoulet, and David Zilberman.
• Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of New Mexico: Profs. Chaouki Abdallah, Greg Heileman and Ramiro Jordan.
• Physics Department, York University, Canada: Profs. Carl Wolfe