1st Intermediate Visualizations Descriptive Plots (Vega/Vega-lite)
Below are the plots that we created to look at the data more in-depth, rather than to look at the big picture as we did in the previous blog post.
- Line Plot
This plot illustrates the measures of different energy types over time, interactively. The viewer can select the measure to compare different energy measures. An example figure is given below.
Some key insights are the following:
- Total consumption has a consistently increasing trend for all energy sources over time. However, consumption per capita decreased sharply for oil around 1980 and stayed relatively stable since then. It is likely to be related to the oil crisis in the world at that time.
- Since consumption and production values are extremely highly correlated, the same patterns occur for production and production per capita measures.
- Energy share for oil also decreased over time, while the share of renewable energy sources like wind and solar increases in recent years. Still, non-renewable sources take the higher proportion, as can be seen in the screenshot above. Renewable and non-renewable energy sources create 2 clusters of lines.
2.Stacked Bar Plot
This plot illustrates the proportion of each energy in the total energy mix, by continent.
This proportion plot illustrates well the dominance of fossil fuels on every continent, with oil and gas being the most widely used energy, in every continent. Hydropower is largely used in the Americas, Europe, Oceania but non-existent in Asia and Africa, as are other renewables.
3. Emoji Plot [modified 30th april because of wrong data]
This plot illustrates the electricity consumption per energy source of each continent. Each emoji symbolizes a PWh (1000 GWh) of energy actually consumed. The consumption of Africa is of around 3 PWh and is marginal compared to other continents. The World energy consumption remains largely dominated by coal, with Asia being by far the main consumer of fossil fuels. Europe is still consuming three times as much oil and gas than renewables or nuclear (two forms of low-carbon energy).
Legend of the plot: coal’: ‘🏭’, ‘nuclear’: ‘⚛️’, ‘oil’: ‘🛢️’,’ renewables’:’♻️’,’ gas’:’⛽’, ‘hydro’: ‘💧’
As one can see, Africa is relying exclusively on fossil fuels to generate electricity. Also, Africa is producing around 4 times less electricity than Asia and Europe. Europe's first electricity source is oil but Europe is also the only continent to rely on a substantial amount of nuclear energy for its electricity consumption.
4. Heatmaps
These give detailed information about the evolution over time for specific energy resources.
5. Normalized Stacked Area Plot
This gives a global view of the relative contribution of different energy resources around the world.
The purpose of 4 and 5: Combining country-specific and global measures.
6. Pyramid Plot
The purpose of the visualization is to let the viewer track the switch between clean and unclean sources namely, fossil and low carbon energy sources over years. It is an interactive plot in which the continents can be selected via a dropdown menu by the viewer. The energy consumption unit is TWh. One little problem with the plot is the huge gap between the scale range of the energy consumption across continents. Here the highest energy consumption among continents is taken as the reference of the upper bound of the scale which leads to a non-informative visual for the outputs way lower than that threshold. The issue is observable in the above screenshot. A scale bonded to the current continent consumption values would solve the problem. We will work on it for the next blog post.
The key insight of the plot: Unclean energy dominates the world. Europe is rather balanced compared to the other continents in that sense.
Gists for the Plots
Interactive Line Plots: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/OmerYigit28/7a087884d6eafa2bccc837b7a4aef68c/raw/fbc63f994b8f5d4c72d8ad04369ad7d32e26252b/InteractiveLinePlot
Interactive Pyramid Plot: https://gist.github.com/Cansu987/dfb1b05c1a96b4bb10c7b7ecef58956f
