Electricity production from renewable resources is gaining momentum,
but what portion of total production does it currently represent?
While electricity is undoubtedly essential for any modern society, few people actually think about its production or consumption. This visualization provides a way to explore the trends in electricity over time. The data can be broken down by geographic regions, and be seen along with the methods used to produce it and the entities consuming it.
The visualization below presents the opportunity to explore the world's production and usage of electricity. The visualization has four main components: one wheel, two flow diagrams, and a ranking area.
Wheel — Located at the center, the wheel shows the electricity production and consumption for a given region. To show the trend around the year selected, electricity for the years before and after are also displayed. Years can be navigated by using the up and down arrows or the year slider underneath the wheel and flow diagrams.
Flow Diagrams — The flow diagrams show the elements that constitute the production and consumption for the selected year. The production elements are located to the left of the wheel, while the consumption elements are to the right of the wheel. Countries were grouped according to the United Nations regional groups. Energy classes were taken from the categories present in the data. For the production side, the energy classes describe the process by which electricity is produced (for example, hydroelectric, nuclear, or combustion forms of generation). Similarly, for the consumption side, the energy classes describe how the electricity is consumed (for example, by households or service providers). Each element is represented with a colored, vertical bar. The associations between elements that compose another element are shown with gray, connecting flows.
Top-5 Ranking — Located at the bottom, the ranking area shows the top-5 countries ranked according to total consumption, total production, and production by renewable processes, nuclear process, and combustion processes for the region selected.
The following options are provided via dropdown menus:
▶ Region: UN standard regions and subregions available
▶ Year: Focus year ranging from 1990 to 2012
▶ Outermost Category: Category to show on the outermost level of the flow diagrams.
Change the category to see how the proportions vary within an element.
Production Inflows
by Region and Type of Production
Total Electricity
Produced and Consumed
Consumption Outflows
by Region and Final Type of User
About This Visualization
This visualization is the final project submission for the class 'Data Visualization and Communication' of the MIDS program.
In this section, we describe in more detail how this visualization was made.
Data — he data comes from the United Nations Annual Questionnaire on Energy Statistics. The country-specific
data covers statistics on production, conversion and consumption of energy resources and products.
Since our project focused on Electricity, we had to manually examine which fields were specifically related to electricity.
With the relevant fields identified, we then organized and cleaned the data. The final dataset was stored as a JSON file to
facilitate querying and communicating with the visualization. We used R and Python scripts to perform all the data cleaning tasks.
The data was downloaded on July of 2015 from the UN Data Explorer application.
Design — To come up with a design, we decided to worked separately on initial ideas so that each person's creative process would remain unbiased. We then presented our mock-ups to the group for discussion. From the set of initial ideas, we decided to implement the 'sankey design' because it was a good representation of the data, it was different from what we had seen before, and it had interesting interactivity associated with it.
Implementation — Like most visualization and website projects, we used a broad set of tools, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, Bootstrap, and D3.js. We relied on GitHub to share and track our code, and also to host our site.
Collaboration was a key factor in our success as a team. Each one of us developed sections of the code corresponding to different components of the visualization. Constant communication allowed one person to adjust the data queries to ease and assist the visual work done by the rest of the group. When the separate components were complete, we worked on bringing them together, making them work as one, adding interactivity, and raising issues or errors that required fixing.
About Us
Julian Phillips
MIDS Student
Kasane Utsumi
MIDS Student
David Rose
MIDS Student
Andrea Soto
MIDS Student