Multi-country power plant companies

Visual Design
#1

Hi, I am making this post as part of a visualisation coursework and am wondering if I can get some feedback on this visualisation.

CommonOwners
CommonOwners2052×1722 527 KB

Visual Design Type: Digital Map

Name of Tool: Tableau

Country: European countries

Year: All years

Visual Mappings:

In this visualisation, the longitude and latitude of the power plants are used to draw points on the map. Colour is used to identify the owner of the power plants. I found that a black background helped me differentiate the colours more easily than a white background.

Unique Observation:

This visualisation allows the viewer to spot power plants that are owned by companies which have power plants in more than one country. For example, the company E.On has powerplants throughout the UK, but also in the Netherlands and Germany. Another example is Vattenfall, who have powerplants in the UK, Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark.

Data Preparation:

Microsoft Access was used in conjunction with SQL to query the data to find owners with powerplants in at least two countries. All powerplants that are owned by these owners are then visualised. Some of the data was also modified such as the owner name ‘100% Vattenfall’, which was replaced with ‘Vattenfall’.

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

Questions:

  • Is it easy to identify countries that a company has a power plant in?
  • Is a digital map appropriate to present this information?
  • Are there too many or too few data points?

Thanks!

#2

Hi, fellow student here!

It is a great visualization, I like the black background.

A digital map is certainly a great way to visualize these information.

The only downside for this graph is the amount of information present, place like France is clear since there is only one owner, but place like UK and Italy is messy since there is multiple owners. Filtering might solve this problem for you.

#3

As the post above me said, it is easy to identify countries that companies have a power plant in if there are only a few different companies in that country, e.g. Sweden, however it is more difficult with a country such as the UK where there are many different companies. I think this is due to how similar some of the colours are e.g. OPDE looks similar to Solaer.

A digital map is a good choice for this data as it shows you the location that the company has power plants in.

I think theres too many data points for the number of colours you have chosen, you could use multiple maps for the owners to help split the data up, for example 8 owners per map. This would also allow you to use colourblind friendly colours which might be difficult with your current map.