Climate scientist Ed Hawkins created warming stripes as a clever and visually arresting data visualization to make climate change feel more immediate. These red, white, and blue stripes became one of the most recognizable climate graphics because they could be read instantly.
In a similar spirit, I want to create a visualization to show the solution arriving. Clean Energy Stripes show each day in the life of a particular electricity grid over years. Blue means low-emitting resources — wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro — won the day against fossil fuels. Orange means fossil won.
Clean Energy Stripes are being released under Creative Commons like the original warming stripes. Anyone can make these with national or subnational data.
If you work in clean energy, this is what progress looks like, one day at a time.
Each stripe is one calendar day (local time for each grid). A day is blue when generation from wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro exceeded generation from natural gas, coal, and oil; orange when fossil generation was larger. In margin view, color intensity scales with the size of the win in gigawatt-hours. Battery storage and “other” categories are excluded.
Data are net generation by fuel type from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor (Form EIA-930), from January 2019 onward. The page pulls fresh data from the EIA API on load, so the stripes extend automatically as new days are reported. Recent days are preliminary and may be revised.
Clean Energy Stripes are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, in the spirit of Ed Hawkins’ original warming stripes. You are free to share and adapt them — make your own with national or subnational data, and credit “John Bistline, Clean Energy Stripes / Data: EIA-930.”
Get the code: a Python script that makes these charts for any grid (MIT licensed) is at github.com/jbws42/clean-energy-stripes.
The palette (blue #1A6F8E, orange #C77A28) is colorblind-safe by design.