NEW YORK, April 5, 2017 – Key energy sector data will now be easily accessible in one place and at no cost on the new and growing ENERGYDATA.INFO, an open data and analytics platform the World Bank Group and partner organizations launched today at the Sustainable Energy for All Forum.
Governments, companies, development organizations, and others can both find and contribute energy-related data on ENERGYDATA.INFO. So far it features more than 150 datasets and applications from 10 partner organizations, including: Bloomberg New Energy Finance, World Resources Institute, Columbia University Earth Institute, GIZ, the United Nations, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Innovation Energie Développement (IED), and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
The collaborative initiative is a public good, aimed at harnessing the data revolution to speed up progress on the seventh United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 7). In developed economies, access to data and complex analytics is fueling the transformation of the energy sectors, while a data gap persists for developing economies where investment is greatly needed.
“To meet the targets for SDG 7, we must invest in and prioritize open data. ENERGYDATA.INFO will be of enormous value to the private sector and to policymakers, providing data they can use to de-risk investments and make more informed decisions, leading to faster impact on the ground. We encourage others to join our effort to make this kind of energy data widely available,” said Riccardo Puliti, Senior Director and Head of Energy and Extractives at the World Bank.
ENERGYDATA.INFO users can access electricity network maps to better plan renewable plant locations and off-grid solutions deployments, technical and commercial performances of African utilities to better assess investment risks, time-series maps of renewable measurement sites to facilitate large-scale renewable feasibility studies, and high-resolution population and settlement geospatial datasets to plan energy projects for greater impact.
Beyond datasets, it features tools to dig deeper, with apps that allow users to:
- Assess the potential market for off-grid energy solutions
- Determine solar power potential and solar plant prospective electricity outputs for any given location
- Monitor rural electrification progress from nightlight satellite imagery data
- Generate universal electrification scenarios, and more.
To meet Sustainable Energy for All objectives, it is estimated that renewable energy investment would need to increase by a factor of 2-3, while energy efficiency investment would need to increase by a factor of 3-6, according to the new Global Tracking Framework report released this week. Estimates suggest that a five-fold increase would be needed to reach universal access by 2030.
