German Energy Landscape: Where and How Is Its Energy Created?

The German Energy Landscape [geblogs.com], designed by Gregor Aisch, reveals some important facts and statistics about the German energy generation and consumption. Germany is one of the frontrunners regarding energy generation, having recently decided to close down all its nuclear reactors, in order to further emphasize the development of renewable sources, such as solar, wind, biomass, water, and geothermal power. The interactive graphs show Germany's different energy sources (such as oil, gas, and renewables), energy resource dependence (e.g. whether these resources originate from within the country, or from somewhere else), and predicted energy mix (how the sources will change in the next 40 years according to 3 different and independent organizations). The visualization makes use of the so-called streamgraph technique, originally invented as ThemeRiver, which was probably best popularized by the NYTimes movie revenue infographic back in 2008. The technique was also used to represent music listening habits (later also called WaveGraphs), Tokyo living statistics and news memes. Interestingly, Gregor made available all the source code to create such StreamGraphs in Actionscript here. It's original Processing version can be downloaded here.

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