Sankey diagram | Continent energy capacity

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.

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

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:

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.

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


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