The Natural Resources Defense Council has yet another map showing the connection between natural resources — sunshine, wind, crops and livestock — and the renewable energy potential attached to them.
The map on NRDC's Renewable Energy for America site color-codes the nation according to regional resources and shows the sites of existing and planned wind, biofuel and biodigester plants. Viewers can click on individual states for close-up views.
NRDC also has picked five states — Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — to highlight as "battlegrounds in the debate about what sort of action our country should take to stop global warming," according to a Monday blog post by Nathanael Greene, NRDC's director of renewable energy policy.
"We definitely plan to use the site as a tool for getting people excited about what they can do in their state with renewables," Greene said Monday.
The map differs from the Path to Clean Energy Google map NRDC released earlier this month in partnership with Google and the National Audubon Society.
That map overlaid renewable energy potential and areas that are environmentally protected or sensitive, in hopes of giving energy developers the tools to avoid battles with regulators and environmentalists over project siting, Greene said.
Those conflicts are already emerging. Take the recent efforts by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to designate hundreds of thousands of acres in the Mojave Desert as protected habitat off-limits to solar power development, as the Los Angeles Times reported last month.
As for its new nationwide map, NRDC plans to add data on solar power projects and geothermal power projects and potential in the coming months, Greene said. More state-by-state features are coming as well, he said — Michigan, Missouri, Indiana, Virginia and Nevada are next on the list.
Much of NRDC's data for the new map comes from the National Renewable Energy Laborator, which offers a host of solar energy maps based on data it has been collecting for decades. New research, such as that into the potential of solar thermal power sites in Arizona, continues (see NREL Hunts for Solar-Thermal Hot Spots).
Other maps highlight energy efficiency data. The Green Grid, an industry group formed to push energy efficiency in data centers, has online tools, including a map, to show which parts of the country hold the greatest potential for using outside air to cool data centers (see Green Grid: Free Cooling for Data Centers).
The Energy Retail Association in the U.K. has its own Smart Metering Projects Map to track the latest and greatest in smart meter deployments worldwide. And the U.S. Green Building Council has included state-by-state Regional Priority Credits as part of the third version of its LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program released Monday.
