Historical Renewable Energy Consumption: Public Data Viz Contest Submission

Tableau is having another data viz contest with a focus on government or public data.  I had some success in working with data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency before, so I thought I would use one of their data sets again.  I have had my eye on the renewable energy consumption data for awhile and this contest was the motivation to get off my duff and design a data viz with it.  


So here is my official submission for the Tableau contest.  Take a look, let me know what you think, and wish me luck!

Energy Generation Viz: My first published data visualization

A former colleague of mine, Walter Frick, works up in Boston for the New England Clean Energy Council.  As a follow up to a conversation we had, he shared this EIA graph with me. As you can see it is an area chart. I've never been able to understand or read stacked area charts.  (Perhaps because they are often used incorrectly?) So, I downloaded the data for the EIA chart and reworked it. Walter liked it and used it for a blog post for his organization. My first public data visualization!

I know that stacked bar charts are not always the best way to see changes in amounts across the x axis for a particular band. However, I think visually it turned out rather nicely.