Gas price rises have been in the news quite a lot in recent months, and with good reason. Clearly, it's a big issue in many ways so I've been trying to explore more about it from a data point of view. This is where the Department of Energy and Climate Change come in, because they now provide quite localised energy consumption data for the whole of Great Britain. There's quite a lot of it and it can be a bit messy and difficult to understand but if you want to find out more the full explanatory pdf is here. From my point of view, I was interested to see how it looked spatially, so I took the domestic gas consumption data for London in 2008 and 2009 and mapped it at the small area level. I've done a full screen map which you can see by clicking on this link but you can also see it embedded below, though it works best full screen. Click an area on the map to see consumption data for that area and a key which explains the colour coding.
Click here to see the full screen version
Finally, a simple dot map of where most domestic gas is used in London. This reflects a number of things, not least the size of properties, but perhaps also things like poverty and deprivation... The final thing to say is that the highest gas consumption areas consume about 41,000 kWh per year and the lowest areas less than 10,000. The London average is about 15,000 kWh.
