This project was to examine and compare countries around the world with regards to energy consumption. It was mainly an exploration based on visualizations using JavaScript and its libraries. Conclusions that were made were purely speculative. They did, however, seem to be a little insightful and reaffirmed some assumptions.
Because of the obvious difference in area and population, we wanted to see how energy consumption varied at the degree of individual usage. Initially, our assumption was that the more affluent countries, such as the U.K. and the U.S., would be one of the largest energy consumers.
After looking at a geographical representation, however, Iceland was shown to consume the most energy, even twice that of Norway, which was number two on the list.
Even after removing Iceland from the ranks, saw that our original hypothesis was only partially correct, in that not only does affluence play a part in energy consumption, but also the climate, as colder areas require energy to for heating.
Another aspect of energy consumption that was considered was what we called the “Little Big Spenders. We sought to find a correlation by calculating the energy consumption per capita over gross domestic product per capita. In other words, we tried to make an association with countries that were extravagant consumers of energy.
Unfortunately, we could not come up with a connection, or there was some underlying factor that we could not come up with.