Power outages are a standard part of natural disasters, be it earthquakes, hurricanes, or just accidental outages. New technology called “VERDE”, which stands for Visualizing Energy Resources Dynamically on Earth, merges information from dozens of electrical utility companies into a Google Earth mashup. The result is a realtime dashboard of the US power grid status.
The visualization program was built after the major Northeast blackout in August 2003, when emergency operations centers got their information secondhand from a panel of eight television screens—one for each major network. “Nobody even knew what was going on the next utility over,” says Budhendra Bhaduri, leader of the Geographic Information Science and Technology group at Oak Ridge, which develops data-mining-based information systems.
via Grid Visualization Efforts Helped Heal After Hurricane – IEEE Spectrum.
