The Energy Market Transition in Google Trends

An Analysis of Keywords regarding the Energy Market

Oliver Grasl
Thursday, January 26, 2017

An analysis of keywords regarding the energy market

Effects of The Change in The Energy Industry

We experimented a bit with Google Trends and visualized the course of searches for the term Energiewende (Energy Transition) on Google as a graph on the timeline.

Energy Turnaround After The Nuclear Disaster

The energy transition was triggered by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in March 2011. It is exciting, or perhaps even scary, how accurately one can read this point in time in the data.

On a meta-level, this little experiment is interesting for two reasons:

Firstly, because the ability to derive meaningful information from data will be a key competency of many companies in the future - including the energy industry. Secondly, we strongly believe that companies need to experiment with business models and business ideas - we call this "Business Prototyping". This type of evaluation can help with that.

In the environment of the energy transition, many topics have taken on new importance. We have started another experiment and analyzed the search queries for about 100 important keywords from the energy environment (only within Germany).

You can see the result in this Word Cloud - here it is particularly interesting to see how high the terms sustainability, green energy and smart energy are ranked; in comparison, the terms electricity price and electricity costs are rather small. (Google users seem to care more about where electricity comes from than its cost).

But the Word Cloud has a whole other meaning - it shows the wide range of issues you have to deal with in the energy industry. And that leads to the question: how do you deal with this complexity?