About Makeover Monday
MakeoverMonday is a social data project which “offers inspiration and a dose of perspective for those who communicate data, and allow people to explore different perspectives and approaches to create more effective visualizations.”
To be more specific, “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”
Inspired by Dong Yu (an amazing data analyst also graduated from USC), I started this project from January 2019 and hope to better understand how to interpret data and translate insights into impactful visualizations.
All my Tableau visualizations can be found here through my Teableau Public profile.
Makeover Monday Week 8
I’ve always thought that wind power is an excellent green energy and should be implemented widely around the world to save the environment from pollution, but it turns out that there are lots of problems with wind power when actually implementing the plan. One of the most significant problems is the high expenses associated with this, which relies heavily on government subsidies. Therefore, it is important to understand how efficiently and effectively each U.S. state is in terms of their investment on wind power.
The original visualization and dataset is here in case you are interested, and the data source is from Choose Energy.
I decided to use Capacity per \$1 and number of households powered per $1 million to measure the investment efficiency and plot the following graph.
However, the data does not incorporate state population, which makes it difficult to gauge the scale of investment.
Insights
- States in the Middle West are among the most efficient wind power cities, while most of the Southeastern States did not even installed any wind turbines. Combined with the fact that green energy is associated with left wing politics, it’s surprising to find out that states like deep red Texas and Oklahoma lead the country in wind power capacity.
- Given state population data, we will be able to have a better idea of the scale of investment and make the metrics more comparable.