Sankey diagram | Continent energy capacity

Visual Design
#1

Hi all, another Swansea student looking for some advice re a visualisation. I’ve attached an image below and any insight on the appropriateness would be appreciated.

SankeyProper
SankeyProper1660×861 163 KB

Description

Visual Design Type: Sankey diagram

Name of Tool: Tableau

Country: World broken down to continents

Year: All years of the dataset

Visual Mappings:
: * colour : colour mapped different continents and greyscale used for primary fuel categories
: * size : size of the curve relates to the capacity of a specific fuel type

Unique Observation:
There is a greater concentration of the capacity of the fuel in Asia and North America compared to South America or Africa

Data Preparation:
Aggregating the data to continents and removing superfluous information

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

Questions:
It is possible to extract meaning from the visualisation?
I’m concerned about the number of curves in the graphic and wanted to know whether I should try to further aggregate the fuel types?
Would a different type of visualisation be more appropriate for what I’m trying to convey?
I haven’t thought too much about the colours for the continents, and wanted to know whether these are acceptable or what I should be looking for when categorising things by colour.

Thanks!

Lorcan

#2

Hello Iorcan, I think your visualization seems amazing but you could be improved.

As you mentioned the number of curves seem quite overwhelming so:

My main suggestions are:

Try to make your primary fuels as “Sustainable” “Non Sustainable” or maybe add a middle category as well such as “Semi-Sustainable” i.e. waste and biomass are quite ambiguous whether they are green or not. I do believe that you will be able to see individual clusters after some filtering.

Last tip: Try to present the names of continents that cannot be shown by reducing/increasing the scale

Great Work

Hope I helped :smile:

#3

Thanks for the reply Thomas. I’ll try to aggregate the primary fuels further and see what the difference is in terms of visability and try and post an update.

#4

I’ve updated the Sankey diagram to condense the fuel types into sustainable and non-sustainable and thought I’d give it a share.

Dashboard 1
Dashboard 11657×861 85.8 KB

For reference I used this youtube video to create the diagram: