Hi Michael -

Thanks for your interest in our work. Yes, I am part of an organized editing effort with the wiki page you found.

We did indeed contact the community through the Forum, once in October 2020 to ask for volunteers to participate in the project, and again in November 2020 to announce the project and solicit feedback. (I've added the link to this post on the Organised Editing/Activities page.) We did not receive any response to either post.

We have received several user comments on our individual edits, some of which included suggestions for different approaches to tagging. We've adjusted our editing process to respond to that (helpful) input. Do you have any specific concerns, suggestions, or advice for our project? We'd be quite happy to hear them.

Best regards -
Colin

Thanks for this guidance. We've followed the guidelines applying to organized processing of a group that you indicated, including following up on our initial announcement/request for volunteers here:

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=70904

and setting up a wiki page here:

osm.wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Climate_TRACE

Yes, those users are part of our team and have been included with other core users on that wiki page. We will use an identifiable hashtag for our future changes to improve traceability.

Thanks again for your help and guidance on this.

One further comment - I forgot to respond to your question about removing the fuel type (coal). Again, I did not intentionally remove this tag. Instead, I changed the way to Feature Type "Power Plant Grounds" which seems appropriate for this area. Apparently that deletes the tag related to the fuel type, which was not my/our intention. As I noted above, we will stop annotating until we are able to get more clarity on these issues from the Forum.

Also, you can read more about WattTime here: https://www.watttime.org/ ; and more about Carbon Tracker here: https://carbontracker.org/ .

Hi, thanks for your guidance on this. I did not intentionally change those tags. Instead, I changed the Feature Type of those towers from "Industrial Building" to "Cooling Tower", since they are obviously hyperboloid cooling towers. However, it seems that the tags associated with "Cooling Tower" are actually incorrect. I will stop using that Feature Type, and revert the previous changes I have made.

And yes, I am part of a small team of researchers working at WattTime (a US-based environmental non-profit) and Clean Energy and Air (a UK-based environmental non-profit recently spun out of Carbon Tracker). We are building a remote-sensing-enabled system to monitor greenhouse gas emissions from all global power plants. Our goal is to make these emissions more transparent to climate researchers and policymakers.

We are using OSM annotations to improve the precision of our models. Since we have found that some power plants are poorly annotated in OSM (not Heizkraftwerk Herne) we are systematically reviewing all coal plants and adding annotations we thought were correct. We will stop doing this for now, and instead ask for more specific guidance on the Forum about the correct tags and Feature Types to use. (We have not found the existing wiki guidance on annotating power plants to be very helpful.) You can read more about our project (known as Climate TRACE) in this article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/fossil-fuels/how-to-track-the-emissions-of-every-power-plant-on-the-planet-from-space

Hi, thanks for the guidance on tagging. However, I did not intentionally delete those tags. Perhaps they were deleted when I changed Feature Type to Power Station Grounds? Unfortunately, I cannot find any guidance at the link you provided about when to use Power Station Grounds vs. Coal-Fired Power Plant (the former seems more correct/general since many coal-fired power plants are retrofitted to also burn natural gas and/or oil). Do you have any suggestions/guidance on this?