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Must See: Where Your Power Comes From, Visualized

NPR has an amazing interactive map of our power grid—the complicated mesh of power plants and transmission lines delivering juice to your house. This picture shows new proposed lines—it looks damn sad without them:

The map gives state-by-state breakdowns of sources of electricity—98 percent of West Virginia’s power comes from coal, nearly a third of New York’s is nuclear—and shows where power plants are, picturing them by the size of the output. The resulting map looks like the US has smallpox.

You really need to see this. And maybe turn down your AC just a little bit. [NPR via BoingBoing Gadgets]

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