Sankey Diagrams

A colorful Sankey diagram for energy flows from Sweden. Found this one on the web page of Länsstyrelsen Skåne (please don’t ask me to read this out loud…) in an article titled ‘Skånska hushåll i fronten för mindre fossilberoende’

Unit of flows is TWh. The orange arrows are imports, the other arrows from the left apparently domestic production, with the majority of energy being from fossil fuels (“Fossilt”). Consuming sectors are at the bottom – in contrast to the typical layout of this kind of energy balance diagrams.

Anyone from Sweden who wishes to comment and explain a little bit?

Found this one on the Coffee Spoons blog. It is originally from an infographic created by Sergio Peçanha of the NY Times.

The Sankey diagram shows cargo flights supposedly loaded with arms, from Doha and Riyadh (among others) to Turkey, and from Zagreb to Amman. All supposedly destined for onward transport to Syria. The “arrow widhts are proportional to the number of flights”.
An additional 2012/2013 time line shows the flight dates and their density. Interesting. One mustn’t confuse the Sankey arrows with number of arms being transported, as there might have been different planes and consequently different cargo loads.

Now I think I should also be looking for a “civil” version, with pax being transported on commercial airline flights.

From a book ‘Environmental and climate analysis for the Norwegian agriculture and food sector and assessment of actions’ by John Hille, Christian Solli, Karen Refsgaard, Helge Berglann, Knut Krokann published on ResearchGate.

Download the full book on ResearchGate.

Not sure about the unit of flows.The unit of flows is kT CO2-eq./year (see comment by Christian Solli). The Sankey diagram shows embodied carbon in food and agricultural products and the overall carbon footprint caused by the demand of food in Norwegian households, and consequently along the supply chains in agriculture/fisheries sector. [Updated by phineas, May 06]

This is very similar to Jason Pearson’s Economy Maps for visualizing environmental impacts.

From the thesis of architect and designer Gabriel Guerriero comes this beautiful Sankey diagram. Labels show quantitites but I have no information on the unit of measurement.

Gabriel writes:

“[This Sankey diagram] illustrates the measures of capacity and exchange of water in the Sacramento/American river confluence. Sankey diagrams are an essential constructive framework to analyze the breaching processes and estimate the manipulated water flows. The work is supported with calculations derived from California Department of Water Resources measurements as a means to describe where flows become broken, crosswired, appropriated, or out of tolerance. While the Sankey should hold a useful matrix to describe a section of a closed system, the Sacramento/American River measurements describe a broken system of flows in which the input of 100% on the top end results in disrupted quantities of output.”

A similar diagram for the Colorado river catchement can be seen here.

Have you ever heard of the city of Issaquah, WA? To be honest, I hadn’t heard of it until I read this post on the New Energy Cities blog.

Issaquah is one of ‘New Energy Cities’ in the Northwest that has created an Energy Map and calculates the carbon emissions it is responsible for based on the fuels used. The role model for these Sankey diagrams are the ones published by the EIA.

Elizabeth, the author of the post, writes:

“Total carbon emissions are depicted in the gray flow lines, by both source and end use. The blue flow line represents hydropower energy used for electricity generation; the green represents non-hydropower renewable energy used for electricity generation; the brown represents nuclear energy used for electricity generation; and the red represents coal energy used for electricity generation. The orange flow lines represent natural gas used for electricity generation and direct heating. The pink flow line represents petroleum used for transportation. The dark gray flow lines represent electricity consumption by residential, commercial, and industrial user categories.”

Wow! I’ve seen those energy Sankey diagrams for the world, for nations and for federal states. But this one for Issaquah is definitely the one that covers the smallest geographical and administrative entity.

Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and The Connecticut Energy & Environmental Protection Agency have conducted a study on waste flows titled ‘Unlocking the Value: Transforming the Connecticut Materials Economy’.

The study features two Sankey diagrams that show the present situation (2010) and a an alternative scenario, where much of the materials are recovered.

This is the current situation in which only 25% of the 3.16 Mt of waste (Building C&D Waste not considered) are recycled.

The authors explain that

“Each year Connecticut residents and businesses generate more than three million tons of munici pal solid waste (MSW, or “regular trash”). Currently existing recycling and reuse programs capture a portion of the value of Connecticut’s waste, while waste-to-energy facilities process and recover energy from most of the MSW that is not recycled. With our recycling infrastructure underutilized, and resource recovery facilities at capacity, there is vast potential to transform our management and processing systems to further unlock the economic potential of waste.”

The optimized scenario with much increased recycling of materials (almost 80%) is shown in this diagram:

Connecticut is looking into the environmental and economic benefit of a recycled materials econonmy.

via Talismark blog

Stumbled across a number of swimlane diagrams developed by Andy Tow in 2012.

As he describes on his blog these were created during a “Hackathon de Visualizaciones” in Buenos Aires. Andy used ‘Sankey by tamc’ (see Sankey software list) to create several diagrams like these.

This one is for the Santa Cruz province and covers elections 1983 through 2011. More images like these for the Chaco, San Juan and Jujuy provinces are available. These are sample screenshots from the ‘Electoral Atlas’ (see below).

Each node represents elections, with the height of the block representing the percentage of votes/seats received. The “leading” party is always at the top. So the bands between two blocks are basically electoral behaviour and (may) visualize political shifts. When two bands join, there seems to be a coalition.

In this special type of Sankey diagram the nodes are of greater importance. The bands represent quantities, however there is a temporal rather than directional aspect to the flows.

This is similar to the Political Parties in Slowakia diagram and to these.

Check the interactive version of the ‘Electoral Atlas’ by Andy Tow, where you can hover the mouse over the diagram to highlight details.

While some of you might think of their favourite lunch time snack, in the UK the term WRAP refers tp the ‘Waste & Resources Action Programme’, an independent not-for-profit company.

WRAP now presented their vision for a circular economy in the United Kingdom by 2020, using Sankey diagrams:

The material flows for the baseline year 2000 are shown in a first diagram here:

In that year, apparently, 212 Mt of material were disposed of as waste (orange arrow), while only 47 Mt were recycled.

The situation in 2010…

… and the vision for 2020 (from this page):

The goal is to use less input materials, to reduce waste output and to recycle 3/4 of the materials.

See diagrams in high resoultion directly on their website.