Fellow Spotlight: Olof Nordenstam

Our Fellow Spotlight series focuses on showcasing the work of our Fellows.

This time, I sat down with Olof Nordenstam, founder of LowCarbonPower.org, who has just finished up his Subak Fellowship looking at improving access to decarbonisation data. 

Olof is a web developer who has been living in the Greater China region since 2008 and currently resides in Taipei. In 2019, realising there was a need for better access to decarbonisation data, he launched LowCarbonPower.org. LowCarbonPower aims to make energy data, focused on decarbonisation, easily accessible to a general audience. Olof believes that data-driven energy debate leads to better energy policy and ultimately a faster transition away from fossil fuels.

Join us as we discuss the Fellowship experience, low carbon power, and Olof’s insight about working at the intersection of climate and data.

Introducing LowCarbonPower

Maisie: Could you just give a brief explanation of what LowCarbonPower is, what your Fellowship project is, and what you are using the Fellowship funding for?

Olof: So LowCarbonPower is a project that takes electricity data from multiple sources and aggregates it into one website, with a goal of making it easy for a broad audience who is interested in energy and concerned with climate change, and hopeful about decarbonisation, to better understand where we're at in terms of electricity. 

So, it's both current data and historic data presented and format of charts and maps and rankings. The project has been going for two years and a bit, whilst the Subak Fellowship has been going for the last several months, and ended just in January. For the Fellowship period I've been working on lots of aspects of the project. The particular new directions that are because of the Fellowship are immense, improving the documentation of the data collection process, and open sourcing the data collection scripts, and then adding the LowCarbonPower data set to the Subak Data Catalogue. So that's all been done. 

And then in parallel, I've continued working on improving the SEO of the website to get better ranking for certain keywords, like ‘low carbon power’ itself, and the equivalent terms in Chinese. I've also been doing, with the help of a designer, work on improving the design of the site. That is very much work in progress because there's an increased complexity of the project. Initially, it was a very straightforward project that just focused on the one low carbon percentage metric. As I've understood the energy field more and and spent more time on it, I started seeing that just focusing on that metric might not be enough. So there's a move to add more data to the site, things like emissions data and electrification. But that makes the site more complex, and there's a danger that it gets overwhelming if there's just too much data on every page. So, I've been working with a designer to try to figure out how to best do that. Together with some other ongoing challenges throughout the Fellowship, I've also been working on improving the proposal for taking the project forward after the Fellowship. 

Maisie: Could you go into a bit more depth about your background, and specifically how you got started on this project? 

Olof: My background is in software. I've been doing website projects, some of them my own projects, and some of them just doing consultancy. So with that background, I’ve always been interested in data. And when I read about an issue, if I get interested in it, I tend to want to learn more about the underlying underlying data and look at trends. So it's been an interest of mine for a long time. Many, many years ago, I was really excited about the Gapminder project, which is a Swedish project - I'm Swedish as well - so that's always been a very inspirational project.

With energy specifically, around three years ago, I heard about a book, which I have next to me right now. It's called A Bright Future. I heard about it on a podcast and I thought that it was interesting because it approached climate change and decarbonisation from a perspective of looking at past achievements. That made it seem very approachable as a problem. What's more, the dataset in this book is quite limited, so I wanted to pick up more on what the history of decarbonisation looks like in other parts of the world. So I went to Google and it wasn't that easy to find what I was looking for. I then ended up looking for source data, and I came upon the BP electricity review dataset: it's been around for a very long time, and it's still very widely used. That became my first source. 

I took that data and created a low carbon percentage metric to solve a problem: to provide a metric that other datasets or organisations don’t provide. For example, the BP data covers many countries, but far from all, so you can't really figure out how the individual countries are doing. So that was the start of it.

So then that got me interested in finding more data sources, but then the problem is that they all do things in slightly different ways. The data isn't necessarily compatible. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to merge different data sources. So now the site has five different sources for electricity data. 

I mean, I can't personally know if that number is correct, or even close to what the real number is, right. But if I have multiple sources, at least I can compare them. So the scripts do a bunch of things like that, when it has, say, three different sources for a particular country and then it'll look at the differences in the numbers. And if the differences are significant. 

Maisie: I'm curious about the biggest challenges that you've had so far with the project.

Olof: It takes time to look at the different data sources, they have differences between them, but they're not that well documented, or certainly for somebody who's not already an expert at this stuff, it takes time to figure out what it means, if it's gross or net generation. So I've been working on that. 

Also, in terms of figuring out the design of the website, serving users, that's a really big challenge, which ultimately goes to address what you can do to effectively educate people about these issues. I mean, how do you present information so that people understand it easily or what are people looking for to begin with? How much do they know already? Those are really, really complicated questions. 

And then there are differences in different parts of the world as well. So the debate here in Taiwan on energy is quite different from the way the English language debate about energy is, there's much less focus on climate change, and much more focus on electricity prices and stability, and air pollution. So the messaging around around these issues has to be different. Those are really, really big challenges and it's clear that I can only do so much. So really the key to getting somewhere is to work with people on these challenges. And the Fellowship has been great because it's put me in contact with lots of people. Yeah, it’s made it much easier to reach out to people. And, hopefully going forward, I'll also have more resources to be able to build a team to take this to the next level.

Maisie:  I think that's such an interesting point about the cultural differences of the framing of the issue. What's your thought process around how to frame the data? 

Olof: We have new Chinese language social media initiatives, separate from what I have on Twitter. So it's not just translating, it's completely separate. There's another person in charge who is thinking more about how to reach a younger audience here in Taiwan who are potentially concerned with these issues but they're not necessarily that concerned with it now. So in terms of social media and blogging, I think the messaging around the data needs to be quite different.

The Fellowship experience

Maisie: What were your key takeaways from working on this during your Fellowship with Subak? 

Olof: I've learned that there's a lot of data available, but it still takes time to find it. That's a good thing. Hopefully, I've done some things to make it easier for other people to find that data to access, to list data sources clearly and link to them. For some of the sources, they're using very old interfaces. It's not that accessible, but it is there.

Another thing would be that there is a limit to what data can do. There's a tendency for people to pick and choose data to prove the point that they really want to make. That's challenging. My hope has been that, because climate change is an issue that's of growing concern, there will be more and more people that follow it. And so when you add more people to the mix, those people are not necessarily coming with a lot of preconceptions, they're just concerned and want to know about it, learn about it, and learn about solutions that are available. So that's an opportunity to educate people. I mean, in the community, when I've been talking to people at Ember or Our World in Data, or Climate Policy Radar, and of course, the Subak team itself,  it's fantastic to be able to have all these conversations.

Collaboration & climate data

Maisie:  You mentioned that you're working with different Subak members, as well as our team and other organisations. So I'm curious as to whether this experience has reinforced your impression that this collaborative approach is the way forward in the climate data space?

Olof: It’s really important, making data easier to find for people. I think it'd be great if people knew about other data sources, or being very self promoting, about the LowCarbonPower dataset, because it merges all these sources for you, so you can more easily aggregate them together. Making it easier to search more and find various data sets is a great thing. And then the community around it, and talking to people about data. I think there would be a lot of value in making those exchanges more public, because I'm sure other people are interested as well. The more the more the better. 

And, of course, you have this whole push to try to make IEA data open. Our World in Data is pushing that a lot. And a lot of people are supporting it. And it seems like it might actually happen. So if that changes, that would be fantastic. Because they have a lot of really good data that's not currently easily accessible. To me, climate change is a tough challenge to solve for sure. But opening up data around it, it's not. Yeah, that's not a tough challenge. That's a silly thing that we do on this planet for some reason to lock away data. Why? It's just just adding sand in the engine.

Advice for future Fellows

Maisie: Finally, we're going to be joined by a new batch of Fellows who will join our community. From your experience with the Fellowship, what advice would you give them to make the most of the experience and maximise their impact? 

Olof: I guess that depends on the project somewhat. If they already have a very fixed direction and just need to work on it, that’s one situation. For me, that’s somewhat true, but there’s also some areas where I need help. So, I would say that there’s a great opportunity in being part of the Fellowship that you can reach out to people. So it could be other Fellows, people in the Subak community, if you ask to be introduced to somebody or contact them directly, if you say you’re from Subak, they’d be happy to talk to you. So just take advantage of that as much as possible. 

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You can visit LowCarbonPower.org here, and follow them on Twitter here.