Taking several visualizations produced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for US country-wide energy use as examples, we explored the possibility of designing and assembling a custom visualization of the energy data provided by the Ministry of Energythe national energy agencyof Guatemala. We found that energy data is consistently collected and regularly published in Guatemala but the reports seldom include graphics and analysis that tell the full story of energy for each time lapse with little to none consideration for the lay reader. In this paper we present preliminary results about the designed visualizations and explain the procedure followed to construct and validate each one of them. As the project evolved we found that the need for this type of representations of energy data is felt not only in our country but in most of Latin America. Efforts to fulfill that need were identified and coordination with them has started.

Data Science is a developing computational field in Central America and Mexico. The high availability of data related to energy and economy through several international agencies provides an excellent opportunity to plan and execute research projects and test tools and techniques. Also, energy is an important subject of research from different perspectives: economic, social, human development, engineering, among others. We took the challenge of locating the sources, collecting the data, cleaning it, performing initial exploratory data analysis, and applying basic modeling techniques to get familiar with the data and understand the information and knowledge it provides in regard to the possible nexus between energy and economic growth. In this paper we present a first recount of the process and some of the insights obtained during its execution.