The Problem (How to obtain green energy information geographically?):

Green energy is important! Because it can provide environmental benefits, energy security, and new jobs chance. We expect to visually explore both broad and specific questions about green energy. Broadly, we wish to answer following questions: (1) Can we point out the efficiency of power generation at various regions in time? (2) Can we visually infer how weather changes influence power generation efficiency. Specifically, can we tell a story about how utilization of green energy affects residents and their economic behaviors at each location?

The Solution (Using PubNub platform to integrate weather related open data sources, then visualizing integration results):

This project requires a few open data sources REST APIs to get the current weather conditions and some related parameters. They are

· Open Weather Map – provides most of the common weather information like temperature, wind-speed, humidity, etc. for a location.

· Sunrise and Sunset – provides current sunrise and sunset time for a location.

· Google TimeZone – provides the time and time zone information for a location.

These APIs are accessed from a server application running on Node.js with Express.js . The client-side web interface for the infographic is based on Mapbox, for displaying the world map, and PubNub is used as the data transfer bridge between server and the client. After weather data collection, they are transformed to green energy capabilities by local weather data, e.g., how much solar energy can be generated is determined by local sunshine time and temperature.

Project Website

For more details, check out the project's website here.

Important Figures

System Structure

Green Energy Sources

Global Green Energy Information