Tracking Light from the Sky Version 2.0 or Monitoring Rural Electrification from Space

We propose a novel data-intensive strategy to improve the monitoring of electricity service provision to rural areas in India and across the developing world. We collect and analyze a unique historical archive of nighttime satellite imagery to track the supply and stability of electricity service at the local level spanning nearly 8,000 nights since 1993. Drawing upon this massive dataset and using computationally-intensive methods, our project is developing the ability to identify regional instability in power supply, increases in the frequency or incidence of power cuts, and other signatures that indicate problems with electrical service delivery, particularly in rural and remote regions where traditional monitoring is difficult.