Germany’s Energy Mix Visualized

Over the past decade Germany has spent a great deal of effort trying to promote renewable energy, and the government recently announced that it would shut all of its nuclear power stations.

Above is a screenshot of an data visualization that shows Germany’s current and future energy landscape. View the full thing here.

It uses a type of visualization known as a steamgraph to show how the country’s energy mix has changed over the past 60 years, and how it is projected to change over the next 20.

You can see that renewable energy still only constitutes a relatively small slice of the whole in Germany. Furthermore, the projected reduction in consumption of energy produced from coal, oil, gas, nuclear will only partly be offset by increased renewable consumption (click through to chart 3) requiring an overall reduction in energy consumption of 32%.

The World Bank’s excellent data repository includes some similar data for lots more countries. As the chart below shows, Germany is leading the pack when it comes to transitioning to a greater reliance on electricity from renewables.

[via Information Aesthetics]