Thermoelectric Water Use Visualization by USGS Vizlab

The lower 48 United States use a total of about 60,000 million gallons of freshwater per day in the process of thermoelectric power production (https://usgs.water.gov/vizlab/water-availability). About 4% of the water is lost to evaporation from cooling towers in a process called “consumptive water use.” This data visualization shows the amount of consumptive water use from thermoelectric power plants in 2020 by fuel type. In addition to showing total consumptive water use by fuel with the height of the tower-like bars, each evaporative water bubble is scaled to the amount of consumptive water use from an individual thermoelectric power plant.

This data visualization is an example of data-generated art and was created entirely with code and data and with no illustrated components. The shape and size of the thermoelectric power plant cooling towers were created using a trigonometric function to create a geometry for plotting. The powerline y-axis was similarly created using functions and line geometries. The hillside in the background was created by plotting the time series of water use by fuel type with semi-opaque area charts from 2010 through 2020. Finally, the text and illustrated legends were also created using code alone. The data are all publicly available data from https://doi.org/10.5066/P9ZE2FVM.