U.S. Energy Flow Super Sankey- Armani Johns

    A Sankey diagram is a type of chart that shows how energy, money, or materials move from one stage to another. The width of each line represents the size or amount flowing through that path. The one shown on this site focuses on U.S. energy systems and how energy moves from its sources to where it’s used. It’s a creative and detailed visualization meant to help people understand how our country handles incoming energy.

           (forgive the quality of my screenshots, this was an issue i could not fix even with editing)

    Right from the start, the chart feels overwhelming. There’s so much going on that it’s hard to focus on one thing. Even though everything is color-coded and labeled, the sheer amount of data makes it messy. It’s one of those visuals that looks impressive at first glance but also takes real effort to interpret.

    The “generation losses” section stood out to me. There’s this huge stream of bars flowing off the bottom of the image, and I assume that’s meant to represent wasted or lost energy from the process of generating electricity. In real life, this happens all the time because energy can’t be fully converted, some of it is always lost as heat or inefficiency (thank the laws of thermodynamics) in the system. It’s a powerful visual reminder of how much energy we actually waste as a country.

    

    Now, this part of the graph has a lot of different sections, but if you look closely, you’ll see a string that goes from mining to extraction all the way up to ventilation. I think this part of the graph is a testament to how much detail and effort was put into this visualization. It’s easy to miss at first, but it shows the smaller, interconnected parts of the energy system that people don’t normally think about.

    I’m kind of stuck between calling it both beautiful and messy. It’s got far too much detail, but it’s also a really cool illustration because of the fact that it has so much detail. I wouldn’t say this is the perfect or even optimal way to visualize data, but for what it’s worth, I love how detailed and colorful it is. It might not make everything clear, but it definitely makes you appreciate the scale and complexity of our energy system.