Global Energy Monitor: Opening access to the world’s energy systems

Keywords: Open-access energy data, energy justice, energy transparency, nonprofit organizations
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Global Energy Monitor’s work seeks to democratize and make transparent information about global energy infrastructure by creating open-access energy facility-level data sets, reports, and interactive tools. By making these data available and collaborating with local anti-fossil and pro-democracy groups around the world, Global Energy Monitor aims to position itself as part of the “infrastructure” of the climate movement - arming front-line groups with freely accessible and regularly updated information about energy projects that affect their everyday lives. By making these data available, and engaging in chronicling the tensions, controversies, and deliberations that surround these projects, Global Energy Monitor’s intervention is to increase transparency about and access to decision-making about the global energy system. Contributing to conversations at the intersection of political ecology, critical data studies, and energy geography (e.g. McCarthy and Thatcher 2019, Avila et al. 2021), this presentation highlights the methodology behind Global Energy Monitor’s power sector trackers, as well as some of the ways in which these have been taken up by climate and energy justice initiatives.