Keeping the lights on with light entertainment: a Power BI custom visual for every energy source our planet needs

Our World in Data publish yearly stats on energy usage by country and energy source type (renewables/fossil fuels/nuclear etc), and this makes for an intimidating dataset on an increasingly urgent and serious subject.

So we at UCOVI decided to see if we could make the climate emergency and energy transition fun; something half way between Greta Thunberg and Morecambe and Wise.

We arrived at the concept of matching each source of energy to its nearest-named Power BI custom visual. Solar energy is visualised on a sunburst, hydro on a waterfall chart, and nuclear with scary mutant fish, with each fish's size reflecting that country's nuclear energy usage in TWH. And since the the language around global warming can often be a touch alarming and melodramatic, we even did this justice by "getting the violins out" with a report tab showing distributions of energy source usage on violin plots. (Each violin shows an energy source, and the distributions of % contribution to countries' energy portfolios contributed by that source.)

We hope you enjoy the concept and learn something. The OWID data doesn't provide data on energy from wood burning, but if did, we'd have used a treemap.