The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has launched a new feature on its website that uses several new interactive Web technologies that let users track the emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) from coal-fired power plants. SO2 is a pollutant that causes acid rain and harm to public health . EPA's Acid Rain Program (ARP) has been tracking quarterly SO2 emissions from covered power plants since 1995. The new features are a welcome tool for helping the public and government officials track pollution, hold polluting facilities accountable, and ensure that policies to reduce pollution are working.
In addition to providing the classic spreadsheet full of data, the agency is also providing several interesting tools for the public to view the data. Interactive motion charts showing changes in emissions and emission rates let the user watch the changes at facilities over time. The feature lets the user select and track emissions from individual plants and compare those changes to the changes at all the other power plants.
Open government advocates have been urging federal agencies to incorporate such "data visualization" tools to help the public see trends, identify problems, and understand the bigger story that all the numbers are telling.
I encourage users to view the brief training video provided on the website to get a better understanding of how to use the interactive features and what the data reveal. (Currently one introductory video is posted, but others may be on the way.) Unfortunately, EPA has not provided a way to ask questions about the new technology and what the data show. Having a live person available to answer questions would be very valuable.
The website also uses Google Earth to map the facilities reporting to the ARP. The user can see where in the country are the power plants with the greatest changes in SO2 quarter-to-quarter emissions from 2008 to 2009. While the map is liberally dotted with blue circles showing the locations of plants that had decreases in SO2 emissions, a large red dot clearly identifies the J.M. Stuart station on the Ohio-Kentucky border as the plant with the greatest increase in emissions. (Using additional data recently supplied by EPA, we can see what J.M. Stuart station, run by Dayton Power and Light Company, is doing with all the coal ash it produces along with the air pollution.)
The data show that since the creation of the ARP, air pollution from SO2 was reduced even as electricity generation increased, supporting the claim that the Acid Rain Program is working. However, the data also raise questions about whether even greater successes are possible and whether the rate of improvement is as fast as it should be.
The ARP is a "cap-and-trade" program that caps the amount of pollution allowed and assigns pollution "allowances" among power plants. The facilities are able to trade the allowances to reduce compliance costs while a gradually shrinking cap ensures that overall pollution decreases. This is the same concept now being considered by Congress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
EPA acknowledged that the information presented on this site is available in data and maps elsewhere on their web site, but the new features are intended "to make it easier to see if, and where, progress is occurring." Making complex data about environmental impacts easier to see is a laudable and much needed endeavor.
I hope the EPA continues to experiment with new technologies for analyzing and disclosing information. I encourage the agency to expand the use of these interactive features to other types of pollution and to link datasets. For example, it would be useful to see enforcement and compliance information overlapping the pollution data, allowing the public to see who's emitting how much and what the government is doing about it. EPA's Toxics Release Inventory program is already working on such applications.
The SO2 emissions tracking tools are found here .
