Visual Exploration of Energy Use in EU 28: Dynamics, Patterns, Policies

Abstract

The paper places emphasis on primary energy resources, their covariation, and their correlation with socioeconomic factors and aims to provide a systematic analysis of their development over time. The analysis uses evidence from European Union (EU) country-level data and is based on visual analytics techniques. Different results from the same territories show that energy consumption does not always reflect or is due to climatological or meteorological conditions. Extensive use of visualization is adopted as a means of contributing to the understanding of energy use, some involved problems and concepts, and energy consumption trends over time. We present an approach that addresses the informatics challenges based on the integration of visualization software, data integration, and cluster analysis. Our cross-sectional energy review advocates that EU energy leaders are moving towards a low-carbon economy. The correlations of energy variables with economic and pollution effects are stronger in greater levels of energy use, which means that energy use has an obvious impact on economic growth and the environment. Visual and automated methods employed for the analysis, reveal the direction, the strength, and the nature of the dependence structure, in clusters covering the range of energy use in EU 28 countries.

Keywords

• energy use
• visual data exploration
• correlation analysis
• trends
• k-means clustering