Visualizing Shipments from Coal Mines to US Power Plants

Thank you to GEB reader Chris Davis for letting us know of a map he has put together for Google Earth visualizing the relationships between coal mines and power plants in the United States. Grab the KML file here.

Relationship between coal mines and power plants in the US.

The map is in response to the Clean Power Plan, which was finalized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on August 3, 2015. The map makes use of public data sources. The data is not live, but Chris has provided the code he used to generate the map. Find the code and more about why the map was created and what it shows on GitHub.

We especially liked the way the points on the maps are connected by arcs rather than simple straight lines. There are no features in KML to do that automatically, but it turns out to be relatively easy to do in code.