Washington DC, 6 July 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

Despite budget cuts to the US administrations' e-government projects and CIO Vivek Kundra stepping down at the end of the summer, data.gov is developing and taking new steps forward. One of those steps is moving to the cloud as we reported.

Another step has been taken this week, with the addition of a section to data.gov that is devoted to energy. This seems to signal data availability is also increasingly a policy instrument to the US administration for the themes the data covers.

As the energy.data.gov portal says: "Energy.data.gov is a new open government initiative to increase awareness of and deepen insights into our Nation’s energy performance. Energy.data.gov brings together high-value datasets, tools, and applications to shed new light on energy use. These 330 free datasets and tools have been gathered from agencies across the Federal government with the goal of empowering all Americans to understand energy issues, including energy consumption within the Federal government." "Whether you are interested in alternative fuels, managing buildings to be more energy efficient, or trying to manage energy in your own home, we have something for you."

Earlier sub-sections, called communities, in data.gov were around more technical topics such as open data and the semantic web, or transparency focussed such as the law section. Now however several of these communities deal with policy topics, such as Restore the Gulf (after the BP platform blow-out), health and health care, and now energy.

The energy.data.gov early focus is on "energy use in homes and buildings and opportunities for energy efficiency, especially among Federal government buildings" and it features challenges, competitions and prizes related to the field.

There is also a promise of more data to come this year: "By the end of the year, Energy.data.gov will feature detailed data sets on Federal agency facility energy use and their prospects for energy efficiency improvements, as well as the Federal Government’s historical energy consumption and costs data back to 1975 by agency, end-use sector, and energy type."

Related links:

EU Energy Data App