Infographic to Keynote: Illuminating Facts About Renewable Energy
Many people report shutting down mentally when asked to review data sets. Data visualization, however, can make complex ideas easy to understand.
Following the Lynda.com tutorial Creating Infographics with Illustrator with Morty Golding, the above infographic was created in Adobe Illustrator. Next, the assets from the Infographic were broken up and moved to a Keynote presentation. A presentation script was created and audio recorded to guide viewers through the presentation. The slides are presented below with the copy directly below each slide.
Welcome to Illuminating facts about Renewable Energy! Renewable energy is a hot topic these days, as we look to supplement and even replace finite options. As the United States looks to sustainable sources for “going green”, let’s take a moment to learn more about what this all means.
Of the 78 Quadrillion British Thermal Units (or BTUs) of energy generated in the United States each year, Renewable energy only amounts for 11.7%. This makes it the fourth most generated source of energy behind natural gas, coal, and petroleum. Both natural gas and petroleum come from fossil fuels, which are quickly depleting; and coal can be harmful to the environment. Renewable energy is ahead of nuclear energy by just above one percent; however, the safety of nuclear energy is heavily debated. With so many questions about how long fossil fuels will last, and how safe coal and nuclear energy are for us and out environment, tapping into renewable sources becomes more necessary each year.
Renewable energy comes from sources that are constantly replenishing, such as hydropower, wind, biomass, geothermal, and solar PV. Hydropower is very clearly the source of renewable energy with the highest demand, but if you take a closer look at this chart you will see that wind and solar PV are steadily growing in popularity while biomass and geothermal sources have remained steady and failed to grow in use for over a decade.
The United States is not the only country looking to make the most of renewable energy. While the US currently leads the way when it comes to the use of geothermal energy and biomass, Germany outranks the rest of the world in its use of Solar energy, and China is at the top when it comes to wind and hyrdropower. As scientists continue to improve the processes by which renewable energy is sourced and costs go down, we will likely see more fluctuation in the rankings.
Between 2006 and 2011, Solar PV energy generation rose from 1,312 to 7,454 million kilowatt hours, and the increase in use is expected to grow by more than another 20 times by the year 2040. Solar energy uses sunlight for heating and to power items that would generally rely on battery power. One of the most popular uses of solar energy is in the heating of buildings and although the cost to install solar heating up-front is high, savings are reported throughout the lifetime of the structure.
In just five years the generation of wind energy in the United States grew by an impressive 350%, with California leading the way when it came to new installations.
Windmills are typically the first things that come to mind when one thinks of wind energy, but today we use something called wind turbine to produce faster results. Wind turbines can be stand alone to support a small structure like a water pump, or grouped together on a wind farm to provide energy to a larger unit like a power grid.
With these types of numbers, the United States will have no problem maintaining its status as one of the top countries in the world with installed renewable electricity capacity.
