In the U.S., the Memorial Day long weekend is a time to honor those who served — and it’s also the unofficial start to the summer season, which means vacations, and unfortunately, miles and miles of driving, often with a gas guzzler. It’s estimated that 32 million Americans will travel over the long weekend. While some will take a plane, train, or a bus, 87 percent will stay true to their love affair with the car, and hit the road themselves. The data visualization below — part of GE’s ongoing effort to make complex information more accessible — examines the question: What would be the impact if we all changed from a gas-powered engine to either a hybrid or full-electric engine? It’s one of our latest partnerships with London-based designer, writer and author David McCandless – who we last met in our health data visualization, “Fit to Perform.”
 Drive time: Click on the image to launch the data visualization. The figures are from AAA’s 2010 and 2009 Memorial Day Travel Forecast reports. |
The simple idea behind data visualization is to take what can often be intimidating amounts of scientific data and turn it into usable information that makes an impact in people’s lives. While most of our efforts have lately been in the healthcare space as part of our healthymagination initiative, we’ve also been exploring clean energy data projects as part of our ecomagination strategy — such as our interactive tool that provides a number of different views on how the appliances in your home consume energy.
* Learn more about David McCandless
* Visit David’s blog
Learn more in these GE Reports data visualizations:
*“Visualizing your energy thirst on Earth Day’s 40th”
*“Visualizing health with The Economist Intelligence Unit”
* Data visualization: A GOOD look at affording care”
* Ben Fry at SXSW 2010: Visualizing data challenges”
* A GOOD look at the ‘Cost of Chronic Diseases’”
* See more health data visualizations in one place
We’re off this Monday in the U.S. for the holiday (hopefully, we won’t be guzzling any gas!). See you again on Tuesday.
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Did this analysis include emissions from the power plants at which the electricity is generated? If so, assuming what fuel mix?
Emissions will be much lower than what automobiles generate. ie: Nuclear power plants generate almost no emissions, Coal and fuel oil plants have much more advanced filtration systems than what an automobile will.
lti…for those who care about CO2: combustion of coal generates considerably more CO2 per per unit of energy value in the fuel than does gasoline, and gasoline generates more than natural gas. OTOH, large power plants have improved combustion efficiency vis-a-vis individual automobile engines..but some part of this efficiency is lost due to transmission losses, battery charging losses, etc.
Again, the analysis provided by GE is a nice visual but is meaningless unless it specifies how these questions were addressed.