In my post about the Next Right Thing last week, I buried the lede that I start a new job on April 1, so I’ll get the important information up high in this post…
Starting Tuesday, I’m the Advocacy Lead for Electricity Maps. I’ll be focused on building partnerships, relationships, and business, mostly in the United States.
Electricity Maps is leading data-driven decarbonization by providing an enterprise-grade API to customers including Google, Samsung, and Cisco, with information about the carbon intensity and mix of energy sources available at any particular time, anywhere in the world.
You can use the free Electricity Maps app on web or mobile to see what the average emissions factors are — and where your electricity comes from — right now. Go ahead. I’ll wait. It won’t take you long…
…pretty cool, right?
Early in my pivot to sustainability, or at least, early in the more intense phase which began when I left Automattic six months ago, I learned about Electricity Maps from… somewhere. Was the Building Green Software book the first place I saw it? I seem to remember looking at the map on my phone in the car at the 14-year-old’s soccer practice one night last fall…
And then one night in January, at the first climate meetup I ever attended, I was talking about the mix of energy sources in one particular state, and then I pulled my phone out of my pocket and used Electricity Maps to illustrate my conversation with someone (then) working for the US Department of Energy.
I wrote Olivier Corradi from Electricity Maps the next morning to tell him the story.
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If you’ve known me long enough, and certainly if we ever worked together in the news business, you know I love a good map. As far back as my second semester of grad school, I mentioned ChicagoCrime.org on my blog, and spent a fair amount of time somewhere around early 2011 writing product requirements for a news map at Gannett that would’ve mashed up crime, real estate, cars for sale, job listings — every local data source we had with a geographic location attached.
That last idea never made it into development, but you can see why I would find it compelling to use a tool that translates dynamic readings of the current (or past, or forecasted) blend of wind, solar, gas, nuclear, coal, and other sources of electricity into useful, actionable insights for businesses to plug into their own applications.
The opportunity to work with Olivier and the team at Electricity Maps comes at the perfect moment when I find myself deeply curious — and learning as fast as I can — about the intersection of data centers, renewable energy, AI, and how to scale software to use cloud computing most efficiently, so we can reduce the carbon footprint of the internet, doing our part to fight climate change.
And that’s the next right thing for me.
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