Discover Spain’s energy grid, one dataset at a time.
Vizzuality are renowned for releasing open data on the web through beautifully designed, interactive, usable applications and tools. With energy generation a key area for the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we thought it was important to team up with Red Electrica de España (REE), operator of Spain’s electricity grid, to make their data more transparent. The result is a new open data platform, which gives the public unprecedented access to real-time data on Spain’s energy grid. Over the last 18 months we have worked with them and the thousands of indicators they monitor to deliver the e·sios (Information System of the Operation System).
We had to find a way to organise and reveal the indicators so they would actually be found, analysed and understood. Our solution uses a mixture of modern design principles and innovative software development, revealing the data progressively through an interactive, high performance platform.
There’s no point committing to open data and transparency if you make it hard for people to actually understand the details and nuance of the data. We built the platform using the idea of progressive disclosure, introducing people to the data slowly then providing more complicated datasets and advanced analysis when you've found the data you're looking for.
With thousands of indicators, many updating every 10 minutes, we had to build a strong back-end to hold and serve all this data. This includes building an open and public API, which is already being used by researchers and universities to request data access or build their own tools. We then visualise the data as interactive graphs through a series of widgets. This keeps the performance of front-end high, helping us entertain and enchant the users with rich, interactive data visualisations.
Learn how we use progressive disclosure to introduce complex data.
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