VISUALIZING ENERGY LITERACY

Energy statistics abound. Public understanding does not. Bridging the gap requires taking into account what people want to know about energy and using that as an entry point to insert what they need to know to make informed decisions affecting, not just what it costs to fill up our gas tanks today, but what policies are required for energy security and economic stability tomorrow.

Visualization can play a role in public education. Much work has been done over the last decade to improve technical capabilities in this area. The public is gradually becoming acclimated to sophisticated graphic presentations in the media and on the internet. Business' appetite for graphic presentation of metrics has spawned elaborate, if not always effective, dashboards. What we will try to investigate here are not dashboards, but storyboards to provide information in a manner that is not only accurate and easy to digest, but appealing enough to be selected from the ever growing menu of multimedia choices competing for the public's attention.

CONTEXT

In telling any story, it is important to set the stage. There are many sources of rich of statistics and graphics on energy that can be drawn upon for this purpose. {See examples below.]

SOURCE: NPC, Hard Truths, Slide 27

Visitors to an Energy Literacy website could use such a map as a "drilling platform" from which to access an underlying database of energy information. Depending on the information accessed, visual representations could be overlayed on a physical map, a timeline, a concept map, or presented in a more traditional chart, but one using more effective technology such as Trendalyzer (should it reemerge from Google's skunkworks). Glyphs could be used to encapsulate multiple attributes in a two dimensional space. Below is an example . The first graph is a visual from a DOE report. It provides little information that could be presented more clearly in a standard input output table.

The second graph visualizes the same data in a manner that shows the input output relationship of each pairing of an energy source and use. The sources are color coded—blue for Petroleum, red for Nuclear, etc. The box is divided vertically and proportionally according to use by the Transportation, Industrial, Residential & Consumer, and Electric Power sectors. Within each sector's column, the height of a color or type of energy represents its contribution to the sector while the width of the column represents the sector's relative size.

Once a glyph is understood, it's visual signature can be compared over time or over regions. While each glyph or box is divided up proportionately according to sources and uses, the overall size of each glyph can be tied to actual totals. For instance, the box above represents 99.8 quadrillion btu's used in 2006. The boxes below are proportionally smaller, representing roughly half and two-thirds the overall use displayed in the first glyph. The color "signatures" also indicate different relative sources and sector sizes.

Country or regional glyphs can be arrayed on a map, providing comparable energy information within a geographic context.

The map and glyphs could also serve as a portal to county or region specific information sources.

TRANSMISSION

All the oil in Saudi Arabia would be of little value if there were no means of delivering it to heat homes, fuel cars, or power factories. Similarly, a presentation is not effective unless its message can be transmitted and received. Any broadbased literacy program will need to take into account where people go for their information and how they retrieve it. This could include, among other targeted efforts:

• a Press Release program for traditional print media such as community newspapers and
• either direct management of a proprietary, controlled contribution Energy Wiki
• or proactive placement of links in, contributions to, and correction of material in Wikipedia itself.