GEO is a set of free interactive databases and tools built collaboratively by people like you
GOAL: to promote an understanding, on a global scale, of the dynamics of change in energy systems, quantify emissions and their impacts, and accelerate the transition to carbon-neutral, environmentally benign energy systems while providing affordable energy to all.
By providing easy to use and visualize data, models and analysis tools we aim to engage the public and the experts.
Data in GEO can be edited from anywhere in the world.
We invite collaborations to help build GEO.
This project was conceived and developed by Rajan Gupta and Harihar Shankar. Dr. Gupta is a fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a theoretical High Energy physicist. Harihar Shankar is a Research and Development Engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 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 and Aswin Venkata. This project is supported by a much larger and growing group of collaborators who have a deep interest in global development and in the energy-development-environment-climate challenge. Our 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 motivates us to support this site and data bases. Our hope is that open source information and analysis will lead to trust and transparency through informed discussion that will result in responsible action. Our goal is to help accelerate all three aspects of the global energy challenge
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.
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.
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.
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: