About Us

Electrify Chicago is an independent open-source project looking to shed light onto one of the biggest sources of Chicago's CO₂ emissions - buildings. By providing more information about some of the city's largest and most polluting buildings, we hope t encourage these buildings to electrify, particularly by mobilizing people related to the building - whether that be students and faculty for a college building or employees and patients at a hospital.

Our Goal: Get Large Buildings to Electrify & Use Less Energy

But Why Electrify?

In simple terms, because we can scalably produce electricity without emitting CO₂ and exacerbating the climate crisis. In fact, this decade (the 2020s) is an especially crucial one for tackling climate change (“World Has Less Than a Decade to Stop Catastrophic Warming…” | The New York Times), and shifting away from burning fossil fuels to using electricity today is a crucial step in that journey.

Even better, Illinois' grid in particular is already powered mostly by carbon-free energy and is improving every year!

Pie chart showing that 67% of Illinois power is Carbon-Free, with 58% from Nuclear and
9% from Wind. Then 18% comes from Coal and 14% from Natural Gas.

Source: Illinois Power | Decarb My State

This means that buildings using only electricity cause less emissions every year as the power grid is moved to carbon-free sources, without any further changes to the building. On the other hand, fossil-fuel powered appliances will continue to emit as long as they are used.

Updates

See our Release Notes page to see data updates and other information, or check activity on our GitHub repo!

Authors

Electrify Chicago is a project by Viktor Köves, a Chicago native and climate developer who was part of the volunteer team behind DecarbMyState and built The Carbon Challenge.

Electrify Chicago is an independent project and not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Chicago.

Sources

Data is primarily sourced from the publicly available Chicago Energy Benchmarking Data , which is data collected and published under the Chicago Energy Benchmarking Ordinance . This site shows data for the year 2020 (the latest available of March 2023) and filtered down to buildings with total emissions > 1,000 metric tons CO₂ equivalent.

Contact Us

Found a bug or have a feature request? File an issue on the Electrify Chicago GitHub!

Other Interesting Pages

There are a lot of interesting ways to view this data, here are a few pages that aren't featured in our header but could be useful: