Now it’s time to have a closer look at the full graphs. Not just one country, like the graph for the UK created with the demo-generator last time. All selected countries have to be shown together. A complication is that some countries are much larger than others. The graph can cover them all, but will be less informative (remember: WebGL should be enabled in your browser to be able to view the original spatial graph behind the link in the picture).
To get a better overview the graph should be split: one covering for very large countries (or rather: countries consuming a lot of energy) like India, China and the USA.
The other one will show a the European countries we selected: UK, France, Germany and – although not completely European – the Russian Federation.
France is very interesting. It uses hardly any coal (its bar is very narrow), more oil than natural gas (the depth of its yellow block – oil – is about twice the height – natural gas). The height of the green part represents the “carbon-dioxide-free” energy and in France it’s mostly nuclear.
Looking at the UK, we can see immediately that more coal (width) is used and slightly less oil (depth). The height of the yellow block is higher than for France, meaning the UK uses more natural gas. The green part for the UK contains more renewables, but also nuclear energy. Both don’t emit CO2. Adding width, depth and total height we will get a higher value for France, meaning its energy-consumption is higher than the UK’s usage.
Germany is a bit of a surprise. Of course we expect the green part to be mainly renewable energy, but nuclear energy is still around at the moment. The surprising part, however, is the high usage of coal (the width of the Germany-bar is larger than the width of the UK-bar and much, much larger than France’s bar). Actually, Germany uses more coal than the Russian Federation! The Russian Federation has a high energy consumption, but it’s mainly natural gas.
Let’s switch to the large comsumers!
The bars for China and India show a large green part and only little yellow. This means natural gas is not very important, but nuclear energy and renewable energy are! Yet the amount of coal used in China is impressive. Remember the graph is now at a different scale and cannot be compared to the European part. Yet the width of the Chinese bar exceeds the combined widths of India and the USA – meaning China uses more coal than both countries together.
We could go on discussing the graphs, but it’s better to manipulate the 3D graphs yourself and really understand what is presented:
The total energy (in e.g. PetaJoules or Barrel Of Oil equivalents/boe) is the sum of width, depth and height. It’s all relative so the measures are not important as long as they are all the same thoughout a graph.
The sources (mainly “fuels”) used to obtain the energy, are represented by
- width: coal,
- depth: oil and the
- height of the yellow part: natural gas.
- the height of the green section represents non CO2 energy like nuclear and renewables.
After some exercise it will be easy to interpret a bar at once and to pick the special ones you’re interested in from a whole graph.
Of course time-ranges will be even more interesting, so the next time we will the abuse the AnRep3D generator once more!
For direct links to the spatial graphs on energy-consumption at a country-level:
Annual reports presented as 3D graphs 
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