Mapping Worldwide Energy Infrastructure

Project Team

Energy team.
Team members Ayooluwa Balogun, Vivek Sahukar, Aneesh Gupta, Gaurav Uppal, Winston Yau, Norah Tan, Scott Heng and Jason Wang

Access to electricity is one of the most important requisites to economic and societal development. It is associated with decreased maternal mortality, increased education levels and decreased poverty. However, one billion people still lack access to electricity. To enable electrification and grid expansion in energy-poor regions, it is crucial to know where the existing infrastructure is. This information can help policymakers and businesses decide on whether to expand the national grid, build a microgrid, or provide direct off-grid solar PV.

Using satellite imagery and remote sensing data obtained through deep machine learning techniques, this project team worked to enable the automatic, global collection of data on multiple types of energy infrastructure and electricity access measures. Ultimately, the goal of this multi-year team is to build a tool that researchers can use to identify and map out worldwide energy infrastructure to supplement ground truth information and allow energy developers and policymakers to make informed decisions on grid expansion.

Learn more about this team’s work by exploring their website and browsing this faculty perspective from team co-leader Kyle Bradbury.

Energy website.