2nd Intermediate Visualizations
- As planned in the previous blog, the heatmaps were combined in a 2D space and the interactivity was integrated. As the viewer hovers, the energy consumption, continent country, and year information are shown in a list. Click here to view the interactive Vega plot, and here to see the corresponding code.
- An animated bar chart is created in D3 to visualize the worldwide energy consumption per capita for different energy sources over time. A logarithmic scale is used, otherwise, the increase in the clean energy sources is overshadowed by still-prevalent non-renewable energy sources. The source code can be accessed via this link. The data source we used can be downloaded via this link. Two snapshots of the animation are given below. Numbers mean the logarithm of the consumption per capita in KWh. For instance, oil=9 means that worldwide oil consumption per capita is around e⁹=8103 KWh for a given year. It can be seen from the second picture that consumption (hence, production) per capita for clean energy sources like wind, solar, and biofuel increased recently. If the same increasing pattern can be extrapolated in the future, clean energy sources may dominate in the future.
3. Two stacked area charts are created — one for consumption per capita measure and one for energy share measure. Each color represents an energy source and the values can be filtered for each continent. Also, interactivity is added to see a specific period of time in the chart. A snapshot of it as an example is given below.
The gist can be accessed via this link. Sources for the data of consumption per capita and energy share can also be accessed via here and here, respectively.
4. What follows is a series of 3 sets of 2 visualisations each. These visualisations give a glimpse of primary energy consumption per continents.
Raw primary energy consumption aggregates were calculated for each continent. The source of the energy is depicted. The primary energy consumption is measured in TWh (10¹² Wh or 3,6*10¹⁵ J).
These graphs illustrate how little energy is actually consumed in Africa, Africa consumption being roughly equal to European consumption from low carbon energy despite the fact that Africa’s population is twice the size of Europe’s population.
From these first two visualisations, one can observes the remarkable boom in energy consumption in Asia from the 1980s after the end of Mao’s regime. Asia’s economic boom is overly fuelled by coal.
The two visualisations below, instead of showing raw consumption aggregates, now display the proportions of each energy in total energy consumption of each continent. The first area chart shows that the dominant energy source on every continents is oil, with the exception of Asia, still dominated by coal. The share of nuclear in Europe reached a maximum in 1980 and has been decreasing since then. Biofuel is non-existent in Asia and Africa and anecdotal in the Americas or in Europe.
From the 1980’s on, Africa has witnessed a proportional boom in gas consumption, at the expense of coal. However, although the energy coming from coal has relatively decreased, coal gross consumption in Africa has never been so high. Overall, this reveals an important observation. Even though the relative share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix has been declining, the amount of fossil fuels consumed has never been so high.
The two visualisations below show which energy source is the most dominant.
