Like many in New England, I live in an older home that would benefit from any improvement in energy efficiency. I’ve started to explore the world of solar panels, new windows, insulation and energy audits. And it’s…confusing. The average homeowner now has to contend with different energy efficiency standards on top of an explosion of financial and technical options to choose from.

I appreciate the simplicity of these visualizations from Beautiful News. At first, “The Cost of Renewables Is Falling Fast” (top left) made me pause and reach for a book by Tufte. Then I counted all of the little lines and realized that the graph does consistently measure the Y-axis in 1% increments…it just transposes the Y-axis labels where one expects the X-axis, flips expectations about up/down and green/red and positive/negative numbers. This is a visualization that bends “the rules” in support of the visual story.

The second visualization, “Replacing All of Your Lightbulbs with LEDs..” (top right), feels more balanced to me. I appreciate how the cost per year and lifetime data are arranged for easy comparison between the different bulb types. And the benefits of LED are made extraordinarily clear.

The electric company has started to share comparisons of energy consumption in my immediate neighborhood. Using data visualization to raise awareness of energy efficiency may be the missing step connecting homeowners with social programs and financial incentives.

Now let me review my water bill…