Quote of the Day
The worldwide demand for cars will not exceed one million –even if just for a scarcity of available chauffeurs.
— Gottlieb Daimler, Inventor, 1901. Early cars were so complex that chauffeurs were considered mandatory. Most technology becomes more user-friendly over time – cars were no exception.
Introduction
Figure 1: Coal Trains Are A Common Sight Where I Live. (Source)
I drive a short distance (7 km) to work everyday. On my drive, I often have to wait at a railroad crossing for a coal-train train to pass (typical example in Figure 1). I have never thought much how much my state depends on coal until I saw an interview with a Missouri senator who was talking about her state's dependence on coal for electrical power generation. I am currently teaching myself how to use the Power Query add-in for Excel, and I thought that generating a graphic of coal dependence by state would be a good Power Query/Visio exercise.
Background
I found the 2013 state-by-state percentage of coal-based electrical generation at this web site. I used Power Query to gather the data and clean it up. I then used a data connection to Visio to load the data into a map of the US. The process worked very well.
Analysis
The analysis was all done in Power Query and involved scraping data from a web site. The rest of the work was linking my Excel workbook to a Visio drawing of the United States – something I do all the time. This allowed me to generate the following plot of the percentage of coal-based electrical generation by state (Figure 2).
Figure 2: State-By-State Coal-Based Electricity Generation Percentages.
Conclusion
I was surprised by the widely varying percentages of coal usage –0% to 95%. This zip file contains the files I used to create this graphic. To use the files, you will have to update the data connection link to reflect where you put the files.