Facts and figures

The International Energy Agency has estimated that global primary energy demand will increase by 40 – 50% from 2003 to 2030 (IEA).

The EnerGEO project consists of 12 partners from 6 countries and  has a duration of 4 years. The project started 1November 2009

Background

The EnerGEO project will provide a contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. To go directly to the GEO website click on the logo.

By developing a distributed system based on the recommendations of the GEO-Architecture and Data Committee (ADC), global collection and dissemination of data relating to the effect of energy use on the environment will be supported. By including active members of the Energy-Community of Practice of GEO, sustained contribution of the GEO-tasks EN-07-02 and EN-07-3 (or any GEO Workpackage derived from these) will be realized.

Importantly, the EnerGEO-project takes the testing and demonstration of the observing system and developed scenarios through the execution of dedicated pilots at heart. These pilots are focused on the most important issues at hand relating to atmospheric composition and land degradation through the use of fossil fuels, future impacts of the use and production of biomass on land ecosystems and food security, sustainable integration of solar energy in current grids as well as the visual impact of large arrays of solar systems and relating to the impact of wind energy on marine ecosystems. Attention will be given to pollutants that are continuously cycling between the atmosphere and aquatic ecosystems, like nitrogen and mercury. The results of these pilots feed into an integrated platform that will be run for several known scenario’s in order to assess energy strategies.

A major challenge of any such system is the connection of a variety of observation systems, each focused on a specific environmental sub-system, to a large number of energy resources, having different impacts (by nature and scale) on the environmental system.