Skip to main content

Real-time electricity map shows the sources of the energy you use

real time electricity map gettyimages 615763460
Dowell/Getty Images
If you’ve ever wondered where your electricity comes from, and how much carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted in order to get it to your plug, look no further than the simply named Electricity Map. A new online tool that aggregates import and export electricity data in real time, it’s able to show you the source of the electricity you use, as well as retrace the CO2 emissions based on the manner by which the electricity was produced at its origin.

“Coal power plants represent almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions,” Olivier Corradi, a French-Danish data scientist who leads the project, told Digital Trends. “Policies unfortunately tend to focus less on closing coal power plants and more on how much wind or solar was installed. We wanted to have an objective, quantified view about the true physical emissions related to electricity consumption in order to guide debates to something more constructive. We strongly believe information precedes action, and we have substantially been lacking information in public debates.”

When the project started a year ago, the researchers included only a few countries on the map. Since then, a community has formed around the open-source project, and its creators have been able to expand to multiple countries around the world. At present, Electricity Map covers Europe, most of Latin America, Australia, parts of India, and is currently in the process of expanding to include the United States (California is already up and running).

Image used with permission by copyright holder

For each region, visitors can analyze electricity production by source and carbon emissions — with production broken down into wind, solar, hydro, hydro storage, battery storage, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, gas, coal, and oil categories. You can also identify the origin of electricity in the past 24 hours, carbon intensity during that time, and even rank the different countries to see which are doing best.

“We’re aiming to be the Google Maps of electricity, and our objective is to digitalize electricity fluxes around the world,” Corradi said.

If you’re at all interested in getting up-to-date information about how the power you use may be affecting the environment, this is totally worth checking out. Heck, you can also sign up to get involved yourself.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more