Welcome to EnergyMap
Welcome to EnergyMap, a tool developed by The Converging World to visualise and understand energy consumption in England and Wales, and to assist all those working to reduce our energy consumption, fossil fuel dependence and CO2 emissions. With EnergyMap, you can:
- Display energy consumption data on Google Maps and extract it
- Define your own regions and extract energy data for them
- See how energy consumption changes with location and through time
- Find the areas of greatest and least energy use
EnergyMap is a free service provided by The Converging World as part of Bristol's year as European Green Capital 2015.
Once you’ve clicked ‘Ok’ to dismiss this box, you’re through to the main map. It has a number of tabs on the right that, when clicked, give access to various controls allowing you to plot and analyse data. The map itself is a standard Google Map so you can pan, zoom and change to a satellite view just as you normally would.
One important concept is to understand the different region sizes EnergyMap uses. We have Local Authority Areas that are broken down into mid-level regions which are broken down into low-level regions. These are statistical areas of decreasing size and you’ll be moving between them as you use EnergyMap.
The control groups are explained below:
Navigate
Allows you to move quickly around the UK map.
You can either jump to one of the Local Authority Area regions by choosing it from the dropdown box then clicking ‘Go’. Alternatively, type the name of any UK place that you can find on a normal Google Map and click ‘Go’ - you’ll be taken right there.
Display
Display data and regions on the map.
‘Draw regions’ draws the most relevant regions to your current location and zoom-level. If you get an error message you’re probably zoomed in too far or too close. Try zooming out or in as advised. ‘Clear’ – removes all regions from the map.
Drill up or down allows you to break your current displayed regions into smaller pieces or go in the opposite direction and see the larger, container region. Here you’ll move between the MLSOAs and LLSOAs explained earlier. If you click on a region to select it, only that one will be ‘drilled’ or ‘undrilled’ otherwise all displayed regions will be affected. The box at the bottom lets you know what type of region you’re currently viewing.
Shade regions allows you to choose a type of data to view on the map. Map regions will be shaded according to how high or low a value they have within that data type and a explanatory scale will appear in the bottom-left corner. Click ‘Choose’ then click your desired data type. Once you’ve chosen, you can ‘Redraw’ your current view with the new data as well as use the arrow on the ‘Redraw’ button to do so with more transparent or opaque regions. Transparent regions allow you to see the underlying map better but opaque regions show the data variance more clearly.
Compare regions allows you to see data about the displayed regions – either click to select the regions you’re interested in or don’t click any to select them all. ‘Compare’ will show a table of all available data for those regions. ’Annually’ shows a graph of data over time for the same data type as you’ve selected above.
Map markers allows you to toggle hover-over bubbles of headline data and labels to show the region names or codes.
Group
Allows you to combine regions then compare them to other groups of regions.
Using the draw controls display some of the regions you’re interested in on the map. Click to select then ‘Save regions’ then give them a name of our choice. Now repeat until you have a list of combined regions. Use ‘Choose data types’ to pick the data you’re interested in then ‘View’ to see the data table. You can view as many data types as you want for the regions you have saved. You can also see one data type over time using the controls below.
Min/Max
Find the highest and lowest values in your area or the country.
This part of EnergyMap works on the map area that is currently displayed in your web browser – zoom out to cover the whole UK or zoom in to your town and its surrounding area. Next, choose to show the Maximum or Minimum results and choose the data type you’re interested in. Pick the number of results you want and then whether you want EnergyMap to show you the highest/lowest Local Authorities, MLSOAs or LLSOAs. Click ‘Draw’ and you’ll see markers start to appear highlighting the information that you’ve requested. Hover your mouse over the markers to get more detail.
Settings
Allows you to change some options around the data you’re displaying. Most people won’t need to change these options except if you wish to shade the map by data of a different year.
We want EnergyMap to be useful to you, and we would like to know how you get on with it. If you:
- Have suggestions for things you would like EnergyMap to do
- Have data that you think could be included in the EnergyMap framework
- Think that any of the data displayed by EnergyMap is incorrect
- Wish to report a bug
- Or have any other comments
The sources of the data used in EnergyMap can be found in the EnergyMap docs section.
Click to visit the data documentation
You will lose any maps you have created unless you right click and 'Open in a new tab/window'
Q: Why do some of the region boundaries not match up?
A: The geographical sets are very detailed and to speed up the service, some of the boundaries have been approximated by selecting, for example, every tenth point.
Q: How are the map regions coloured?
A: Upon drawing a map, a range of colours from blue to red are generated corresponding to the range of values present in the selected datatype. The value that a colour represents is relative to the other values present on the map so a dark blue on one map may well represent a different value to dark blue in another map.
Q: What is TOTAL domestic or commercial energy consumption?
A: This figure is derived by adding together gas, electricity and, in the case of domestic, economy 7 consumption to give the total energy for which we have data.
Q: What is the difference between gas/electricity consumption per house and per meter?
A: UK census data provides us with the number of households in an area whereas DECC's energy consumption data provides the number of energy meters within the area. These numbers may vary for a number of reasons such as if a house has more than one meter, if one of the figures is more out of date and, more commonly, if the households don't actually have a meter of that type.
We recommend using per meter as the number of meters will be correct for the year in which you are viewing consumption data and you will see the actual average consumption of a house using that energy type. The number of households may be up to 10 years old as a census is only taken at this interval. The number of households and per household value may still be useful in some situations.
If you have found EnergyMap useful, please consider making a donation to the The Converging World.
A regular or one-off donation will be used to invest in wind turbines in India. This helps to combat climate change and fossil fuel depletion, and generating vital funds to support environmental and social projects in India and the UK. Learn more about our work here.
- Tim Barker : Project Manager, Developer
- Tom Stedall : Lead Developer
- Sam Carlsson: Statistical Analyses
- Will Dyer: GIS Data Processing
EnergyMap was made possible by generous funding from the following organisations, to whom we extend our thanks:
We are also most grateful to the following for their willingly shared expertise:
- James Sample: in geographical data and GIS
- Crispin Cooper: in spatial analysis
- And Alex Wilding: in more or less everything
Finally, we acknowledge the open source community, without whose shared code and expertise, much less would be possible.