{"id":2697,"date":"2020-04-21T21:34:55","date_gmt":"2020-04-21T21:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dvsnightingstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=2697"},"modified":"2021-06-07T18:05:48","modified_gmt":"2021-06-07T22:05:48","slug":"visualizing-energy-production-in-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nightingaledvs.com\/visualizing-energy-production-in-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Visualizing Energy Production in the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Are renewables on the rise? Depends where you are.<\/em><\/h2>\n

Energy: we all use it, but we rarely think about where it comes from. That\u2019s a problem for climate action! In the U.S., more than 90%<\/a>\u00a0of our anthropogenic (human-caused) CO\u2082 emissions come from burning fossil fuels for energy, and while states have been slowly transitioning to use more renewable energy, the overall energy picture is still dirty with coal dust.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I wanted to show how that\u2019s changed \u2014 or not \u2014 over the last few decades.<\/p>\n

As an energy analyst who\u2019s passionate about dataviz, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make a wonky topic more accessible to the general public. The energy system is complex<\/em>. On one side of the equation, you have energy consumption \u2014 how much people are using. On the other side, you have production, which is itself an intricate web of markets linked through imports and exports. Since I couldn\u2019t depict the whole energy system in one chart, I decided to focus just on electricity production, to highlight changes in energy sources over time. I used data from the\u00a0Energy Information Administration<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0net generation<\/em> (the amount of electricity available for use by consumers, after subtracting the energy that power plants use themselves), which is tracked by state, year, and type of resource.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Chart<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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My goal in visualizing the data was to clarify, without overly simplifying, the story of electricity production in the U.S. I wanted to convey both my optimism \u2014 look at all that new renewable energy! \u2014 and my concern \u2014 why aren\u2019t we doing more?<\/p>\n

But as I finished arranging the state-level charts I had made into a map of the U.S., I realized there was more nuance to the story than I had expected. Even though I had worked with this data set before, I\u2019d never seen it visualized state by state, and I had no idea how strong the regional patterns were. While coal production has in fact declined in some parts of the country and across the U.S. as a whole, it hasn\u2019t budged a bit in my home state of Missouri. (Or West Virginia, or Nebraska\u2026) The band of wind energy blowing through the Plains States is immediately clear. And while we hear a lot about solar energy in the news, it represents an almost imperceptible portion of most states\u2019 energy portfolios. If I squint, I can kind of see some solar in California\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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So what accounts for these differences? The first thing to note is that the U.S. as a whole has made progress in cleaning up its energy supply \u2014 since 1990 coal production has declined by 28%, and renewable production has nearly doubled. That\u2019s encouraging, but because the U.S.,\u00a0unlike many other countries<\/a>, doesn\u2019t have a federal target for renewable energy generation, those gains have largely come from state-level efforts.<\/p>\n

To understand some of what\u2019s going on at the state level, let\u2019s take a closer look at two states in particular: my home state of Missouri, which is sorely lagging in renewables development, and California, which is a consistent leader. Some of the differences in production can be explained by differences in climate and the energy resources available \u2014 California is sunnier than Missouri, so solar energy just makes more financial sense there. But differences can also be explained by policy and political climate. As you can see below, California has adopted increasingly ambitious\u00a0renewable portfolio standards<\/em>\u00a0(requirements for how much renewable energy must be produced)\u00a0since 2002<\/a>. Missouri, in contrast, only adopted its renewable portfolio standard\u00a0in 2008<\/a> and set it lower than what had been initially adopted by California six years earlier.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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There are, of course, many other factors that contribute to state-level differences in renewables development. (The energy system is complex.) But most point to one key conclusion: cleaning up our energy system won\u2019t happen unless people demand it. Unfortunately, many barriers to clean energy development are invisible to the public. For example, one issue currently slowing renewables development in Missouri is the\u00a0lack of support for innovative financial strategies<\/a>\u00a0that reduce the cost of closing dirty power plants to shift toward renewable energy. (Because utilities recover construction costs slowly over the expected life of a plant, closing a plant early can leave utilities and their customers (us!) with huge unrecovered costs.) With so many coal plants expected to operate for decades to come, states like Missouri will continue to lag on renewables until their residents push for change. And while the ins and outs of financial policy may be best left to lawmakers, the public\u2019s job is to keep the pressure on.<\/p>\n

Looking back at this map, I think it tells an important piece\u00a0<\/em>of the energy story, but of course it doesn\u2019t capture everything. As with any viz, I had to make tough choices about what to show and what to leave out. In this case, because the story I ultimately wanted to tell was about trends in the adoption of renewable energy, I chose to focus on the percentage breakdown of energy sources from state to state, rather than the amount of energy produced. This decision allowed me to show each state on the same axis scale, but it also meant that the final viz doesn\u2019t convey anything about the relative amount of production in each state \u2014 like the fact that, in 2018, the barely-visible sliver of solar energy produced in California (27 million MWh) was roughly equal to the\u00a0total\u00a0<\/em>amount of energy produced in Massachusetts. And as for some of those dramatic shifts in energy resources, like Vermont in 2015? Vermont didn\u2019t suddenly adopt an aggressive clean energy policy \u2014 it simply\u00a0decommissioned its only nuclear plant<\/a>, dramatically decreasing total production. Magnitude is an important piece of the story, but I couldn\u2019t find a way to incorporate it. Let me know in the comments if you can think of a creative way to include both together!<\/p>\n

What I hope this viz communicates is that, yes, the U.S. overall is on a positive trajectory toward phasing out fossil fuels, but we have so much work left to do. We can\u2019t afford to be sluggish in shifting away from fossil fuels. We shouldn\u2019t have to squint to see the contribution of renewable energy.<\/p>\n

My experience creating this viz also made me think more broadly about the role that dataviz might be able to play in climate analysis and climate action. Even as an energy analyst, I learned something new simply by displaying the data in a new way. Seeing Missouri\u2019s dark gray coal production continue, unchanged, for nearly three decades makes me angry, and that anger inspires me to keep pushing for local large-scale renewables. Dataviz is about taking numbers and complicated messages, which don\u2019t typically motivate people, and translating them into stories, which do. So, to enable big, bold climate action, what needs to change in each of our communities? And can dataviz help us get there by changing the story we tell?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Categories<\/span>All Stories<\/a> Data Science<\/a> Topics in Dataviz<\/a><\/div>
Tags<\/div>Data Visualization<\/a>Earth Week<\/a>energy<\/a>environment<\/a>sustainability<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are renewables on the rise? Depends where you are. Energy: we all use it, but we rarely think about where it comes from. 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