About this project

The Mapping Energy History project is motivated by proposals to transform the world’s energy and our belief that history matters: past energy transitions can help us understand our potential future path.

This interactive visualization shows 200 years of evolving energy use in America as an animated Sankey diagram. Line widths represent per capita energy flows each year from primary energy sources (left) to final uses (right). The research is documented in Suits, Matteson, and Moyer, “Energy Transitions in U.S. History: 1800–2019” and its extensive supporting information. (This paper is available here as a preprint.) This animation is part of a larger ongoing effort to assess and visualize the history of energy usage and energy infrastructure: see also our visualization of U.S. long-lived energy infrastructure and its valuation at us.infrastructure.rdcep.org. In late 2026 we will be releasing a similar Sankey visualization of China’s energy history, and an interactive version that allows users to upload their own datasets.

Features

Mouse over the flows for values of individual fuel streams.

Drag the timeline slider to control the animation by hand.

Black circles along the timeline mark “milestone” years of special interest; click these to open up additional information.

The stacked bar chart at bottom shows the evolution of energy usage by sector or by fuel type, as either fractional, per capita, or absolute usage.

Click “hide electricity waste heat” to see the diagram without tracking energy lost during electricity generation.

Settings

Energy flows are given in per capita units, as Watts per person of primary energy. (Absolute units are less informative since the U.S. population grew by 60× over this period.)

The default animation accounts for all energy used, so that the total area of left and right sides of the diagram are equal. To ensure this we track the waste heat of electricity generated with steam or gas turbines and allocate it proportionately to sectors.

Note that we assign all non-thermal electricity generation (hydro, wind, and solar PV) an efficiency of 100% (zero waste). These primary energy flows should then be interpreted with care, since each produces roughly 3× as much electricity per unit primary energy as do thermal sources (gas, coal, oil, nuclear, and geothermal).

Contributors. This project is led by Liz Moyer, U. Chicago Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences; the research lead is Robert Suits, University College London, Dept. of History. Graphics were built by Nathan Matteson, DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media, and by members of U. Chicago’s Research Computation Center, including Daniel Blandes, Ramesh Nair, Milson Munakami, Kalyan Reddy Reddivari, Sergio Elahi, and Prathyusharani Merla.

License. Licensed for public use under the Apache License, Version 2.0. You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an as-is basis, without warranties or conditions of any kind, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

See Contact page for information on data use and potential collaborations.