RKugel/cleaned_sustainable_energy_0020

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Global Sustainable Energy - Cleaned Dataset (2000-2019)

About This Dataset

Cleaned version of the Global Data on Sustainable Energy (2000-2020) dataset from Kaggle (by Ansh Tanwar).

Each row = one country in one year. Covers ~176 countries over 20 years (2000-2019), with data on energy access, electricity production, economic indicators, and CO2 emissions.

Original: 3,649 rows, 21 columns After cleaning: 3,171 rows, 18 columns, 0 missing values

Research Question

Is renewable energy making a real difference in reducing CO2 emissions, or is it just a drop in the bucket?

Dataset Columns

What I Cleaned and Why

Dropped 3 columns

Dropped rows

• —Rows where CO2 was missing — that's my target variable, I can't just make up the thing I'm trying to predict.
• —Rows with more than 2 missing values — the differences between countries are huge (std is 5x the mean for CO2), so filling in multiple values per row would just be guessing.

Filled missing values

For rows with only 1-2 missing values, I used each country's own median. Makes more sense than using the global median — Afghanistan and Germany are not the same country. If a country had no data at all for something (like a country with no nuclear power), I filled with 0.

Fixed the Density column

The column name had a \n character stuck in it and the values had commas ("2,239"), so pandas read it as text. Removed the commas, converted to numbers.

Descriptive Statistics

The CO2 std (779,480) is almost 5x the mean (162,366). That tells you right away that a few countries are responsible for most of the world's emissions.

What I Found

1. Emissions are super unequal

The top 10 countries emit more CO2 than the other ~166 countries combined. China alone is on another level.

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2. Big polluters DO produce renewable energy — just not enough

China produces over 800 TWh of renewable electricity, more than anyone. But when you look at what share of their total energy is renewable — none of the top 10 polluters even hit 50%. There's a big difference between the amount of renewables a country produces and how much of their energy mix it actually covers.

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3. Renewables grew, but so did fossil fuels

Between 2000 and 2019, renewable electricity went up (green bars). But fossil fuel electricity went up even more (coral bars), and CO2 (red line) kept climbing. Renewables aren't replacing fossil fuels — the world is just using more of everything.

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4. Fossil fuels grew faster than renewables in the biggest polluters

Looking at the top 10 polluters: China added ~1,500 TWh of renewables from 2000 to 2019, which sounds great, but it also added over 3,500 TWh of fossil fuels. For every 1 unit of renewable energy, 2+ units of fossil fuel.

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5. Correlation heatmap — what actually drives CO2?

Filtered for strong correlations only (|r| > 0.5). CO2 correlates 0.99 with fossil fuel electricity (no surprise), but also 0.86 with renewable electricity. Why? Because big countries produce more of everything — more fossil fuels AND more renewables. Size drives both.

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6. Outliers are real, not errors

The boxplots show crazy outliers in CO2, GDP, and fossil fuel electricity. These aren't bugs — it's just China, the US, and India being way bigger than everyone else.

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My Answer

Is renewable energy making a real difference, or is it just a drop in the bucket?

It's complicated. On one hand, countries with a higher renewable share do tend to have lower emissions. So renewables help at the country level. But globally? Not really. The top polluters produce tons of renewable energy in raw numbers, but it's a small fraction of their total energy. Fossil fuel production is still growing faster than renewables. Between 2000 and 2019, the world added more fossil fuel capacity than renewable capacity, and total CO2 kept going up.

The problem is also super concentrated — a handful of countries are responsible for most of the damage. Unless those specific countries speed up the transition away from fossil fuels, it doesn't matter much what smaller nations do.

So yeah — renewables are growing, but at this pace, it's still mostly a drop in the bucket.

Source

• —Dataset: Global Data on Sustainable Energy (2000-2020) by Ansh Tanwar
• —University: Reichman University
• —Course: Intro to Data Science
• —Author: Roie Kugel