Hi everyone. I’ve made a visualization showing the distribution of power plants in the United States as well as how many are there for each fuel type and how much energy they are estimated to generate.
Image:
Visual Design Type: Map + Pie Chart + Bar Chart
Name of tool: Tableau Student Edition
Year: 2017
Data Preprocessing: Country Long (filtered: United States of America)
Visual Mappings:
Map:
X-Axis, Y-Axis: Latittude, Longtitude
Mark: Circle
Size: Sum(Estimated_generation_GWh)
Colour: Primary Fuel
Pie Chart:
Angle: CNT(Primary Fuel Type)
Labels: CNT(Primary Fuel Type), Calculated Percentage for each fuel type
Colour: Primary Fuel Type
Bar Chart:
X-Axis, Y-Axis: Primary Fuel, % of Estimated Total Generation GWh
Labels: Percentage of the Total Generated Energy in 2017 in GWh
Colour: Primary Fuel
Source: http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/globalpowerplantdatabase
Unique Observations:
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Distribution of power plants: The majority of the power plants seem to be located along the coasts with there being considerably less in the central northern part of the country. The are around Chicago is also densely built.
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Renewables vs Non-Renewables: While power plants using renewable energy sources account for 55 percent of all power plants they seem to not be generating much of the total energy. In fact they only generate approximately 14% of the total energy. The rest of the energy is generated by non renewable sources.
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A few plants generate most of the energy: 25% of all power plants generate approximately 86% of the energy in the United States. Especially interesting are the coal and nuclear plants where 4.76% percent of the plants generate 50 percent of the total energy of the country.
Questions:
Does this visualisation feel overwhelming for the viewer or does it have suitable level of complexity?
What else can be included to provide a more complete analysis of the power plant network?
Thank you for reading. I appreciate the feedback.
