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Bay Area Tech Nonprofit To Track Power Plant Pollution With Artificial Intelligence

By Megan Burke / News Editor, Mark Sauer / Host, The Roundtable

Published June 6, 2019 at 11:15 AM PDT

This story was published more than 4 years ago.

The Dave Johnson coal-fired power plant is silhouetted against the morning sun in Glenrock, Wyo., July 27, 2018.

Watt Time said it plans to use satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to track plant pollution and make its data public.

The announcement is startling: air pollution — including carbon emissions — from every power plant in the world will be precisely tracked in real time. This comes from a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit called Watt Time.

With a $1.7 million grant from the Google Foundation, Watt Time plans to use satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to track plant pollution and make the data public.

"In the U.S. and Europe and maybe Australia you have bodies that are regulating this," Chiel Borenstein, operations and partnerships associate at Watt Time said. "But in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia and India, person X on street Y doesn't really know what's causing the health hazards and the damage to their own life and their own ecosystems. So, if we can open source that data, people will be held accountable and everyday citizens will know what's really going on."

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As part of coverage from the KPBS Climate-Change Desk, Mark Sauer spoke with Borenstein about Watt Time's ambitious goal.

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Megan Burke

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Megan Burke is an Emmy-award winning news editor overseeing the environment, health, and racial justice and social equity reporting beats. Prior to her current role as editor, Megan spent more than a decade as a producer for KPBS Midday Edition, a daily radio news magazine and podcast. Other news production credits include KPBS Evening Edition, KPBS Roundtable, and San Diego’s DNA, a two-part documentary highlighting the region’s oldest traditions and culture using personal artifacts and oral histories of San Diegans.

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Mark Sauer

A newspaperman for more than 30 years, Mark Sauer joined KPBS in October 2010 and previously served as the host of the KPBS Roundtable. He spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune after stints at The Houston Post and at two papers in his native Michigan. A features/human-interest writer in the UT's Currents section for many years, Mark also spent about a third of his UT career as an editor and reporter on the Metro Desk. He has covered a wide range of events: Wild fires in Southern California and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast; Super Bowls and the World Series; foster care and child-abuse issues; the Roman Catholic Diocese's sexual-abuse scandal and bankruptcy; royal visits of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana; Republican and Democratic national conventions; high-profile criminal trials; and many other stories, from the silly to the sublime. Along the way, he interviewed everyone from presidents to pan-handlers. His work exposing the false accusations and prosecutions of several San Diegans for murder, rape and child abuse garnered Pulitzer Prize nominations and many regional and local journalism awards, including Best in the West, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism and several San Diego and California bar-association awards. Mark has a degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

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