The U.S. Department of Energy, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Planetary Skin Institute recently released a new open platform hosted by OpenEI which enables state and local governments, agencies, corporations, and other energy analysts to effectively visualize energy use data and make energy data more useful for decision-making processes.
Good news, everyone! The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) now officially recognizes the OpenEI utility rate database. Up until just a few months ago, the EIA website stated:
After several months of development and testing, the next generation web service for the utility rate database is finally here! I encourage you to check out the V2 Utility Rates API at http://en.openei.org/services/doc/rest/util_rates
This week, Denver hosted the US DOE Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) 2013 Peer Review. The purpose of the peer review is to offer geothermal stakeholders an opportunity to learn about the projects funded by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) across a wide spectrum of technical complexity and funding magnitude, from research and development to demonstration and analysis.
OpenEI has launched a new Water Power Gateway, which contains links to critical public data sets, up-to-date information on technologies and events, a community forum to discuss topics of interest, links to major research and industry reports, and more.
As a result of the recent upgrade, and some internal improvements, OpenEI now features a host of new result formats to enhance your wiki content. You can find a list of them right here: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Result_formats
I would like to call extra attention to two of these:
SmartGrid.gov is a resource for information about the Smart Grid and government-sponsored Smart Grid projects. The information on SmartGrid.gov helps consumers and stakeholders understand the basics of a Smart Grid, and also brings data generated by recipients to the public.
That data is key to the long-term success of a true Smart Grid, and you can download it, only on OpenEI.
We would like to inform the OpenEI community that OpenEI will be undergoing a significant software upgrade during a maintenance window this weekend. We will be upgrading the wiki and semantic mediawiki portions of OpenEI, which means /datasets, /apps, /lod, /sparql and /community will continue to function normally. Additionally, web services that rely on Ask queries (utility rate database API) may have some downtime as we transition.
The DOE Energy Secretary Steven Chu will be hosting a google hangout open to the public tomorrow afternoon to answer questions related to the Sunshot Initiative.
After several months of development and testing, the next generation web service for the utility rate database is finally here! I encourage you to check out the V2 Utility Rates API at 
