The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

If you hang around any of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s many mailing lists, or if you follow us (or any of our people) on Twitter you may have noticed that we’ve been quietly working very hard on something recently. That ‘something’ is a new mini-project called Europe’s Energy and you can now explore it here:

It is being launched to coincide with a big European Council meeting today, which has energy policy as one of its core topics. The application aims to help to put European energy policy (including the 2020 energy targets) into context, building on the work we did at the Eurostat Hackday in London just before Christmas.

You can use it to:

  • Compare different EU countries in terms of their carbon emissions, renewable energy share, energy dependency, net imports, and progress towards their respective renewables targets
  • Find out how much energy different EU countries consume, how they consume it, and how this has changed in recent years
  • Find out how much energy different EU countries produce, what the energy mix is like in different countries and how this has changed in recent years

The data is mainly from Eurostat, with a few other additional bits and pieces from elsewhere. This is just the beginning of our work in this area, and we’re very interested in looking at more fine-grained data, and new kinds of data. As part of publicdata.eu, we’ll be aggregating and providing a single point of access to all kinds of energy-related open data from local, regional and national public bodies from across Europe. So if you’re interested in energy data, watch this space! :-)

If you want to follow our work in this area, you can join our new europes-energy announcement list. If you’d like to contribute to discussion, or you’d like to talk to us more about our work in this area, please do come and say hello on our open-energy discussion list!

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Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.