Today PSE Healthy Energy is excited to release a beta version of our California Power Map, an interactive map designed to help researchers, nonprofits, community members, regulators, and policymakers answer questions about the California power sector and inform the transition to a cleaner electric power system. We have included data, figures, and filters to help users better understand power plant emissions, operations, and nearby population demographics. While we based our designs on input from numerous interviews with potential users, we are also excited to learn about the new questions you will bring to these data.
If you have questions or suggestions, or run into a bug, please let us know! We will be updating these maps both to refresh the data each year as well as to reflect your feedback. We’re also happy to get on the phone or sit down with you and walk through the interface, and we’ll be happy to set up a free custom training for nonprofit organizations. Please email Elena Krieger at krieger@psehealthyenergy.org.
Below, you can take a walk-through tutorial of how one might interact with and ask questions of the California Power Map. Using the site’s first visualization — the Statewide Demographic View — we show how to filter for a specific plant by name, look at the distribution of certain plants through an environmental justice lens, and identify pending decision-making opportunities where clean energy could provide an alternative to pending fossil infrastructure investments. Click through the descriptions on top to get a walk-through of the visualizations.
