By Lance McKee
The “tragedy of the commons” has become a widely understood concept. Markets alone cannot keep that tragedy from playing out in countless ways as a human population of more than 7 billion demands resources for living. We therefore can’t escape the need for well informed, well-coordinated energy policies at all levels of government.
The increasingly familiar energy policy drama involves politicians, judges, business leaders, consumer advocates and environmental watchdogs debating legislation, regulation and fiscal policy. They can’t reach consensus without facts about the commons that have been established by good science. Geospatial observation, measurement and analysis tools are essential for establishing such facts.
These tools are essential, too, for businesses, who use them to compete more effectively. With a proper policy framework in place, such competition often results in reduced CO2 emissions and more efficient use of natural resources.
Advancement in the Earth sciences and energy management depends significantly on geospatial standards from the OGC and partnering standards development organizations. Environmental data and data about energy production, consumption and infrastructure needs to flow unimpeded by differences in technologies and data formats. Geospatial standards enable data sharing and they support workflows among Web service based Earth system models. They provide systematic access to diverse Internet-connected sensors and they can support data rights management, provenance and security.
The next OGC Technical Committee (TC) meeting includes sessions focused on the Smart Grid, Indoor/Outdoor location integration, sensor webs, augmented reality, 3D, meteorology and oceans, data preservation and other topics that ultimately have energy policy significance.
The University of Texas at Austin is hosting the March TC meetings. As part of an international team, scientists at the university have played a key role in developing WaterML. WaterML is an important enabler for sharing hydrological data, which is notoriously difficult to aggregate and share but often a critical consideration in energy policy discussions. Along with the University of Texas at Austin, Australian agencies played a critical role in developing WaterML 2.0. Organizations in Europe and other regions also contributed. Without international agreements on domain models, data sharing and interoperability are extremely difficult, and thus many domains have OGC working groups.
Energy efficiency standards and emission standards are the standards that people think of when they think of energy policy, but those are not the only standards that apply. My colleagues and I at the OGC will have more to say in future posts about the relationship between geospatial standards policy and energy policy.
