Table of Contents

WORLD GREEN ENERGY GENERATION ANALYSIS

What is Green Energy?

Green energy is any energy type that is generated from natural resources, such as sunlight, wind or water. It often comes from renewable energy sources although there are some differences between renewable and green energy.

The key with these energy resources are that they don’t harm the environment through factors such as releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

As a source of energy, green energy often comes from renewable energy technologies such as solar energy, wind power, geothermal energy, biomass and hydroelectric power. Each of these technologies works in different ways, whether that is by taking power from the sun, as with solar panels, or using wind turbines or the flow of water to generate energy.

In order to be deemed green energy, a resource cannot produce pollution, such as is found with fossil fuels.

This means that not all sources used by the renewable energy industry are green. For example, power generation that burns organic material from sustainable forests may be renewable, but it is not necessarily green, due to the CO2 produced by the burning process itself.

Green Energy Types

The main sources are wind energy, solar power and hydroelectric power (including tidal energy, which uses ocean energy from the tides in the sea). Solar and wind power are able to be produced on a small scale at people’s homes or alternatively, they can be generated on a larger, industrial scale.

The six most common forms are as follows:

Solar Power

This common renewable, green energy source is usually produced using photovoltaic cells that capture sunlight and turn it into electricity. Solar power is also used to heat buildings and for hot water as well as for cooking and lighting. Solar power has now become affordable enough to be used for domestic purposes including garden lighting, although it is also used on a larger scale to power entire neighbourhoods.

Solar energy is the most abundant energy source on the planet, because the sun shines down every single day. Anywhere the sun touches could be converted into solar power.

Wind Power

Particularly suited to offshore and higher altitude sites, wind energy uses the power of the flow of air around the world to push turbines that then generate electricity.

Hydropower

Also known as hydroelectric power, this type of green energy uses the flow of water in rivers, streams, dams or elsewhere to produce energy. Hydropower can even work on a small scale using the flow of water through pipes in the home or can come from evaporation, rainfall or the tides in the oceans.

Wave and tidal power is generated using large underwater turbines. These rotate with the ebbing and flowing of the moving water to create energy. The turbines are connected to electrical generators that turn this kinetic energy into electricity, which we can use. Tidal energy is the oldest form of renewable energy. It was used by the Romans when they occupied Britain to power water mills.

Exactly how ‘green’ the following three types of green energy are is dependent on how they are created.

Geothermal Energy

This type of green power uses thermal energy that has been stored just under the earth’s crust. While this resource requires drilling to access, thereby calling the environmental impact into question, it is a huge resource once tapped into. Geothermal energy has been used for bathing in hot springs for thousands of years and this same resource can be used for steam to turn turbines and generate electricity. The energy stored under the United States alone is enough to produce 10 times as much electricity as coal currently can. While some nations, such as Iceland, have easy-to-access geothermal resources, it is a resource that is reliant on location for ease of use, and to be fully ‘green’ the drilling procedures need to be closely monitored.

Biomass

This renewable resource also needs to be carefully managed in order to be truly labelled as a ‘green energy’ source. Biomass power plants use wood waste, sawdust and combustible organic agricultural waste to create energy. While the burning of these materials releases greenhouse gas these emissions are still far lower than those from petroleum-based fuels.

Biofuels

Rather than burning biomass as mentioned above, these organic materials can be transformed into fuel such as ethanol and biodiesel. Having supplied just 2.7% of the world’s fuel for transport in 2010, the biofuels are estimated to have the capacity to meet over 25% of global transportation fuel demand by 2050.

This notebook analyzes two datasets:

Load Dataset

Data Cleaning and Structuring

Remove unnecessary columns

Replace TypeCode 'codes' with 'names'

Round float columns to 2 digits

Rename Entity to Country

Since we will be only using the matching country records from the df_wre and df_wre_se datasets, we rename their Entity column to Country.

Add Total_WSO and Total columns

Merge Data and Country DataFrames

Save cleansed datasets

Data Dictionary of Datasets

Column Name Type UOM Description
Country string Country name
Year int 1965-2019
Wind float terawatt-hours (TWh) Wind generation
Solar float terawatt-hours (TWh) Solar generation
GeoBiomassOther float terawatt-hours (TWh) Geothermal, Biomass and Other generation
Hydro float terawatt-hours (TWh) Hydro generation
Total_WSO float
Total float
TypeCode string Country, Dependency, Unknown
Continent string
Region string
Latitude string
Longitude string

Preparing aggregated data frames

By Year

2019 by Continent

2019 by Country with cumulative percentage information

Data Visualization

World green energy generation by types between 1965 and 2019

World green energy generation in 2019 by continent

World total green energy generation map between 1965 and 2019

Green energy generation between 1965 and 2019 by top 5 countries in 2019

Green energy type breakdown in top 10 countries in 2019

Top 5 producers of each green energy type in 2019

References