The US Energy Information Administration puts out reams of data on US and international energy, covering almost the full spectrum of sources – oil, gas, nuclear, renewables – as well as consumption, production, imports, exports, prices, storage, etc.

But energy markets are vast, often disjointed, and sometimes lacking in transparency. And there may be some salient bits of information – or potential uses for that information – that slip through the cracks. So the EIA is asking anyone and everyone for feedback about its data in an effort to provide better data services through additional data sets, enhanced visualizations, and other tools that can make energy more accessible to a broader range of interested parties.

The EIA launched the American Energy Data Challenge earlier this month to help drum up new ideas. The first challenge – the Energy Ideas Challenge – aims to identify new ways of using energy data to develop applications and services. The EIA will accept submissions through November 29 in one of the three following categories:

• Best Idea for An Existing Dataset: Which of the EIA’s existing datasets do you find most useful, and why? How could this dataset be improved, and how can the existing data be used to solve a problem? If you win, you get $4,000.
• Best Idea for a “Wish List” Dataset: Is there an EIA dataset that does not exist but would be valuable to you? What should it include, how should it be structured, and how would it be an improvement on datasets already available? The winner gets $2,000.
• Best “Killer Idea” for an Energy-focused Application or Service: Do you have an idea for an app that could provide an “elegant” solution to an existing problem? You don’t need to know how to code, just identify the problem, proposed solution and datasets involved. Potential winnings: $4,000.

Voting will be open to the public from december 2 to December 13. And if you don’t win this time around, future challenges – Apps for Energy II, Energy Data by Design and The American Energy Challenge – are scheduled to run between now and October 2014.

Submit your idea, or vote for someone else’s idea, here.