Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Marc Chalufour

First, there was fire. Then came domesticated animals, steam, and combustion engines. Transitions to new forms of energy have sparked some of civilization’s greatest advancements in quality of life. They’ve also damaged the environment and magnified societal inequities. Can a world grappling with climate change realize the benefits of our next energy transition while avoiding the pitfalls? That’s the motivating question behind a new project at BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS): Visualizing Energy.

Every Monday, the team at Visualizing Energy publishes a story on their site related to the connections between energy and human well-being. Each story includes data visualizations that, they hope, translate complex topics for a broad audience. Topics have ranged from efficiency improvements in engines from 1700–1900 to how the COVID-19 pandemic affected energy insecurity.

“I’ve had a longstanding interest in using energy as a way to understand and communicate the connections between society and the environment,” says Cutler Cleveland, founder and director of the project. “Energy affects every part of our existence. A lot of the things that we take for granted in terms of life and comfort, particularly in a rich nation, are based on these changes.” Health, jobs, and equity are all impacted by energy access.

Cleveland, a professor of Earth & environment and an associate director of IGS, came up with the idea for Visualizing Energy while writing a textbook. The connections between energy and our lives, he realized, could be revealed with dynamic online graphics. “There is a lot of jargon surrounding energy, so you have to find ways that people can relate to content in ways they have experienced in their everyday lives,” he says. “I have learned from a lot of mistakes over the years trying to teach this material in the classroom.” Visualizing Energy published its first story in January 2023.

Data scientist Heather Clifford takes the lead in building the data visualizations to accompany Cleveland’s stories. They see their work as filling an important void between academia and the general public. It might even provide a model for other academic disciplines. “There’s a lot of people doing really amazing research—but there’s not enough people being the bridge for communicating it,” Clifford says. 

In one of the project’s early successes, Cleveland and his team partnered with WBUR and the Justice Media co-Lab—itself a partnership between BU’s College of Communication and BU Spark! in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences—to investigate the placement of electric car charging stations in Boston. Their analysis of existing stations revealed most to be clustered in just four neighborhoods, while residents elsewhere in the city have a 20-plus minute walk to the closest charger. WBUR’s story, published in February 2023, was accompanied by a Visualizing Energy map detailing the location of every public charging station in Boston.

For other stories, Cleveland and Clifford use existing data to create visuals—sometimes partnering with BU faculty. Jonathan Buonocore, an assistant professor of environmental health at the School of Public Health, shared data he’d collected in a study of the health impacts of oil and gas production. On the interactive maps created by Visualizing Energy, portions of gas-producing states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania stand out in magenta and dark purple, an indication of their high density of childhood asthma cases and deaths attributed to air pollution.

Approaching the first anniversary of Visualizing Energy’s launch, Cleveland and Clifford are looking forward to expanding. They’re interested in conducting original research as well as developing interactive reports to publish alongside their stories. Cleveland says that he’s already heard from faculty who are using Visualizing Energy graphics in their classes; now he’s hoping to get broader exposure through more mainstream media pickup. 

“I still write journal articles—that’s the foundation of science and engineering,” Cleveland says. “But I am emphasizing a different route at this stage of my career: to try and get this information out there in ways that will help people understand what’s happening, the causes and effects, and what the opportunities are.”