Inspiration
We were curious to examine if there was any correlation between the types of fuel that a country used and the growth of its GDP. We hypothesized that countries that used more renewable energy would tend to have smaller GDP growth rates, for such countries would in principle be developed countries. Developing countries on the hand, would use more fossil fuels, and this would correlate with their higher GDP growth rate.
What it does
Our program extracts the maximum capacity per country per energy type, takes its ratio to the average capacity, and extracts the projected gdp growth rate per country. It then arranges it neatly for it to be plotted.
How we built it
Challenges we ran into
As most of us were inexperienced in sorting, manipulating, and writing data to .csv files, this project was a learning experience for us. We struggled to create some of the dictionaries and subdictionaries, but thanks to the help desk we were eventually able to create our program. Our other problem occurred when we saw the time our program would take to execute. It would have taken 20 hours for a single computer to sort through all of the data points, so we decided to instead split up the task over 3 computers, and we also narrowed our data down to North and South America.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
We learned that there was no strong correlation between the types of fuel that a country would use and it's GDP. There were certain types of fuels that had more correlation than others, but in the end, none of the data was convincing. We were surprised by this, as we imagined higher uses of renewable and technologically advanced fuel sources would correlate to lower GDP growths, but it was not the case. Additionally, there was no real correlation between countries that strongly relied on fossil fuels and higher GDP growths.
What's next for Analysis between GDP growth and energy consumption
We hope to analyze the entire data in the API in order to obtain more data points than we used due to our limited time. With more data, we hope to see better trends in our data.
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