We are excited to announce updates to the Northwest Clean Energy Atlas.

The Clean Energy Transition Institute (CETI) designed the Atlas to provide regional stakeholders with interactive visualizations that explore energy data relevant to deep decarbonization in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Our visualizations explore energy resources and uses by sector, greenhouse gas emissions, and utility service territories.

When we launched the Atlas in May 2022, the most recent data on our visualizations were from 2018 or 2019. With tremendous help from CETI Research Fellows Cassidy Quigley, Jade Sauvé, and Leslie Nguyen, the energy and emissions visualizations now use the most recent available datasets (2019 or 2020).

With this update, you can see some interesting clean energy trends, such as a recent increase in wind and solar energy generation, particularly in Oregon and Washington, and the gradual decline of coal production in Montana. In visualizations that include 2020 data, you can also see changes in energy consumption and emissions, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you are new to the Atlas, check out two blogs by CETI Researcher Ruby Moore-Bloom that explain what to expect from the data visualizations and how to navigate the website. Keep an eye out for future blogs that explore different aspects of Atlas visualizations.

Next week, we are releasing Community-Defined Decarbonization: Reflecting Rural and Tribal Desires for an Equitable Clean Energy Transition in Washington. With that release, the Atlas will also include the maps created for the paper that show the community-level relationship between energy burden and various socioeconomic factors.

Thank you to everyone who has provided us with feedback on the Atlas to date. We took your suggestions to heart and made several improvements.

Please explore the updated Northwest Clean Energy Atlas, continue to offer your observations, and share the Atlas with your network.