Gantt Chart Visualisation of Power Plants and the Fuel Source Used

Visual Design
#1

Hello I am a Swansea University Student studying Data Visualisation and have produced some representations of the Global Power Plant Database data set, here is one. This Gantt Chart represents created power plants against the fuel source they use to show that as the years change so does the type of power plants created.

Image:image

Source : http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/globalpowerplantdatabase

Visual Design Type: Gantt Chart
Name of Tool: Tableau Desktop
Country: All countries
Year: All years
Visual Mappings: Colour: primary_fuel
X-axis: commissioning_year
Y-axis: primary_fuel
Data Preparation: Removed null data

Observation: As the years increase so does the amount of renewable power plants that are created also less non-renewable plants are created.

Questions:

  1. Does the graph represent the data clearly?
  2. Any advice on other visualisation techniques that could present the same data more clearly?
  3. Could the chart be clearer when it represents the data? Eg Increase the X-axis to make the points more obvious and not just a block.

Thank You.

#2

1 - It is clear apart from points where there are so many plants being made that the bar is a solid colour, its hard to get a reading from those areas.
2 - I think this is the best option for this selection of data.
3 - Maybe just taking the last 50 or so years of data could solve the block of data issue and it would also be more relevant because many of the fuel types dont go back very far.

Hope this helps

#3

I also used this reference to help me understand Gantt Charts more clearly: