I was in Germany last week, taking in both art and nature. While driving around the country, I found it impossible to ignore the overwhelming number of wind turbines – alongside the highway, in small villages, and even off the coast of the Baltic Sea. I know that renewable energy is increasingly cost effective, as well as good for the environment, and that numerous countries are installing solar panels and wind turbines to provide cheap, clean power. But the sheer number of turbines was quite something to see.
I did some reading, and found out that it's not my imagination; Germany has been investing in wind power at a faster rate than many other countries. How fast? That's what we're here for at Bamboo Weekly, to find out such things.
This week, we'll investigate the growth of wind power among countries in Europe, and find out just how ahead of the curve Germany is on this front (or if it is).
Data and five questions
This week's data comes from Ember (https://ember-energy.org/), an energy think tank that publishes information about countries' energy production, use, and trade. The data comes from their "Yearly electricity data" page (https://ember-energy.org/data/yearly-electricity-data/). You want to download the "Yearly electricity data - long format", available at https://storage.googleapis.com/emb-prod-bkt-publicdata/public-downloads/yearly_full_release_long_format.csv .
Learning goals for this week include: Pivot tables, multi-indexes, plotting with Plotly, correlations, and window functions.
Paid subscribers, including members of my LernerPython+data membership program at https://LernerPython.com, can download a copy of the data from a link at the bottom of this message. Paid subscribers can also download my Jupyter/Marimo notebooks (provided with tomorrow's solutions) and participate in monthly office hours.
Here are my five tasks and questions. I'll be back tomorrow with my complete solutions:
- Import the CSV file into a Pandas data frame. Which five countries currently (from 2024 data) have the greatest amount of wind-generation capacity?
- Which 10 countries have increased their wind-generating capacity the most from 2014 to 2023? Where is Germany in that mix?