App Description: The application is for looking at electrical power generation in the United States and what energy sources are used for each plant. The first page of the app is a map displaying the Illinois power plants from 2018. This display is accompanied by a legend to show the colors used to display each energy source, a set of checkboxes to filter what energy sources are shown, and a reset button to reset the view of the map if zoomed in or out to the original display. The map displaying Illinois allows the user to zoom in or out and lets the user move the map. When the user hovers their mouse over a point on the map the name of the power plant is displayed. For the checkboxes as long as the “All” box is checked all of the energy sources will be displayed. Once the “All” box is unchecked the user can start to filter which energy sources are shown on the map by checking or unchecking each energy source box.
The next tab has to do with comparing data between two states. Another difference with this map beyond being able to view more states than Illinois is that the user can also view data from the years 2000 and 2010 in addition to 2018. The user has two choices when clicking on the tab, “Individual” and “Linked”. If the user clicks on “Individual” each map on the page has its own set of checkboxes (similar to the first tab), and clicking on “Linked” both of the maps share the same set of checkboxes. Each map also has their own individual reset button to reset to the original view for each map. Another feature for these maps is that the data where the power generated is reflected in the size of the points on the map. Power plants that generate more energy have points with a larger radius and points that produce less energy have a smaller radius. Above each map are two drop down menus, the first for selecting which year to display the data from and the second for selecting which state to look at. Each map still has the feature of hovering the mouse over the point on the map to show the name of the plant.
The last data tab is for being able to filter the data by the amount of energy produced. Like the last tab this tab shares the same dropdown menus, checkboxes, and reset button. This tab differs, though, in that there’s only one map and this map can display the entire United States. The checkboxes are also initially unchecked so the map isn’t displayed until one of the boxes is checked. This tab also has two slide bars to choose what the minimum should be for the data displayed and the maximum for the data being displayed.
Data Description: The data used from this app was provided by the United States Environmental Protection Agency website (https://www.epa.gov/egrid/download-data). Once the data was downloaded I opened it using microsoft excel. I created a copy of the data from the years that I needed from the data (2000, 2010, and 2018). Once I created the copy for each year I saved that copy as a CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv) file. This file makes it easy for reading in the information using R. After that I went through the columns for the data that wouldn’t be used in the program and deleted the columns. I also went through the data to delta the “#” character wherever it showed up. The reason for this is that it caused problems when trying to read in the data, so it was easier to just remove the character. Once all this was done I read in the data to be used for the app.
The first change I made in R was renaming the columns for the energy sources to simplify the names. Since these names would be used often in the code I thought it would make the code easier to write and make the code look cleaner. I then made it so all the data in the energy source section would be converted to integers rather than characters (also removing the commas when used in this process). For the 2010 and 2018 data the fossil data and other data needed to be combined. So, I combined the two columns into one and named the column “Other”. After this I converted all the names of the states from abbreviations to the state’s full name.
Now that the manipulation for each column was done more columns needed to be added to each dataset. The first was the total energy used from all the energy in each energy column. After this was done then the percent for each energy column can be added by dividing the column for each energy by the total energy column. After this a column needed to be added for the total energy from renewable energy sources and the percent for the renewable energy sources. The same needed to be done to add a column for non renewable energy sources.
After this was done a subset for each of the energy sources was created to use for displaying the data on the map. I thought this made it easier when it came to plotting the longitude and latitude for each of the specific data points. Unfortunately this wasn’t able to work for the data from 2000 so those maps weren’t displayed properly. The map for Illinois had its own dataset that was filtered to just be data from Illinois.
Interesting Data Finds: For Illinois in 2018 it looks like the most common source for energy in the power plants are Oil, Gas, and Wind. While it seems like Oil and Gas are used for pretty much all over the state, Wind seems to be primarily used in more of the northern part of Illinois. What is kind of ironic, though, is that in the Chicago area the main energy source being used in the plants is Gas. This is kind of funny that there’s no data for Wind in the Chicago area considering one of Chicago’s nicknames is “The Windy City”. Another set of data that’s more concentrated to northern Illinois is Hydro. The Hydro energy sources seem to be centered around rivers and lakes, but once again this energy source isn’t found really in the Chicago area. This is also kind of funny considering one of the most iconic parts of the city is that it’s right next to lake Michigan.
Another interesting state to look at for comparison is Texas. When comparing the data from Texas in 2010 and 2018 there’s a huge change in the amount of Solar energy used. In 2010 there’s virtually no power plants using Solar energy, but in 2018 it looks as though solar energy is being used throughout the entire state. Another energy that has a large spike in usage is Wind energy. I remembered from the last project that Texas was one of the more noticeable states that used Wind energy, but it becomes more prevalent in 2018. Similar to Illinois, though, it seems like gas is the most common energy source being used in the state. However, though it only looks like there are two plants in both 2018 and 2010 that use Nuclear energy it looks like those plants produce more energy than all of the other energy sources for the power plants. So maybe there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of power produced by a certain type of energy and the amount of power plants that use that energy (more power produced means less power plants that use that energy).
When looking at the entire United States map it looks like Gas is probably the most common energy source used for the power plants in the United States in 2018. What’s interesting is when looking at Hydro it looks like most of the states where Hydro is common are states along the coast of one of the oceans or states near lakes and rivers. When looking at the east coast too it seems that each energy source is pretty commonly used except for Wind. Maybe part of the reason for this is that a lot of space is needed to install multiple windmills and maybe there isn’t enough room for this along the east coast.