As one commenter put it, you can “see that Spain’s road to success is a rather boring one (a thin line of 1:0 wins) while Germany was pretty inefficient (big lines, no gain).”

Drawing this was fun, although I was not happy to see my favourite team drop out in the quarter finals already…

In doing the Sankey diagram I found it difficult to handle null flows (that is, explicit zeros, not “no value”) in a Sankey diagram. Also I am not happy with the differentiation of regular goals and penalty goals (brown Sankey arrows). Maybe I’ll come up with a different presentation in time before the 2014 worldcup in Brazil….

(click image to enlarge)

The typical LLNL graph has been extended by the red section on the left that shows a world energy breakdown. Only the U.S. energy consumption is traced further.
The second extension is the pink section. Here, Johan has broken down the energy use sectors ‘Residential’, ‘Commercial’, ‘Industrial’ and ‘Transportation’ in one or two further steps.

All flows are in TWh, data is from 2005 to 2009. The author used several additional data sources and recompiled the data, so that “figures may differ from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory estimations”. See notes for further information.

Good Sankey diagram, and definitely a great job Johan did here. The only suggestion I have, is to add percentage figures to the regional energy breakdown (red section on the left). Unfortunately, the watermark spoils the overall impression, but this is owed to the fact that he used a free trial version.

Johan also mentioned that he is working on forecasts up to 2050, and an animated GIF “running it over time since 1950 up until 2008″. Hope to be able to show you these here on the blog someday.

Unfortunately, this Sankey diagram has some shortfalls, which qualify it as being a “bad example”. These are:

• Sankey arrow widths are not always to scale (see for example the flow of 7.6 W in the middle labelled “surface”, which is definitely not half the width of the 14.6 W flow marked “Joule loss”)
• Arrows branching out of the main flow are shown as short stubs, just as if the quantity is represented by the length (!) of the arrow, rather than its width. A completely new concept for Sankey diagrams. Have a look at the 0.9 W mini-stub “Surface” in the cone area, and at the 1.2 W stub “Surface” in the linear motor box.
• The diagram uses dotted-dashed frames to mark sections in the diagram, at the same time it uses white arrows with a simple border line for the Sankey arrows. Either colored or grey areas, or colored Sankey arrows would have helped enormously.
• Arrows branch off orthogonally, and to accomadate for the reduced quantity in the remaining flow, the border of the arrow on the opposite side curves in. This is not wrong as such, but rather uncommon, and can best be observed in the linear motor section at the left. Same phenomenon for arrows joining the main arrow. The arrow heads just overlap rather than actually joining the other arrow graphically. The receiveing arrow bulges out on the other side.
• The section between the exhaust heat exchanger and the regenerator is awkward, and probably wrong. How can you branch off 296.6 W and 5.8 from a stream of 320.5 W, and are still able to have a flow of 63.0 W lead away from the remaining flow. I have not yet figured out what the problem is, but possibly the “Carnot minimum” flow was supposed to be drawn the other way round.

When I get to figure out the last issue I might draw this Sankey diagram myself, and post it here.

Daniel used the LLNL 2008 U.S. energy flow charts as model for his Sankey diagrams in Excel. Here is what he came up with (clipped section):

Actually the result is quite close to the original Sankey diagrams, with similar colours, arrow routing, and even the same fonts.

Daniel explains:

“I lightened the colors on the input boxes (had to do it), but otherwise I think my rendition is faithful to the original. I may have stayed too true to flow pipe proportionality. Some of them are so thin they do not print well. This should be addressed. While my pipes are seemingly lined up, they will not survive the chart being resized vertically without some small errors, either gaps in a pipe stack, or overlap.
(…)
An interesting project would be to create an Excel addin that would allow you to specify category box locations and have VBA do all of the grunt work in lining up the flow pipes, automatically creating the chart. (…) In it’s current form no VBA was used. “

So, if you wish to draw a Sankey diagram with the Microsoft Office package installed on your computer, and enjoy using VBA, you might want to give it a shot. Gabor Doka’s Sankey helper (an Excel macro) is another option. Dedicated Sankey diagram software tools are available. It would recommend one of those, if you need to produce more than one Sankey diagram, or wish to make updates to your diagram and layout adaptations more comfortably.

BTW, here is the story on the man behind the Sankey diagrams at LLNL.

At the tip of the joint arrow head you can see the target share price, which is calculated as “the result of mathematically combining all of our forecasts for a company into a single number representing the per share value of the company.” When playing around with the parameters, this value will adapt accordingly.

Here are some examples

Forbes, techCrunch and the New York Times all reported about what the latter calls “America’s Next Top Stock Model”, but none of the mentioned Sankey diagrams though.

Have fun playing around with the models … they have fancy Web2.0-silverlightish animations too. But don’t blame me if the share doesn’t reach the forecasted price

I admit it is all new to me and I had to lookup stover and biochar on Wikipedia to understand what it is all about. So, apparently the slow pyrolysis process has several advantages: It works with waste biomass (waste management), it produces biochar that can improve soil, it produces energy (syngas) and it captures carbon.

The Sankey diagram in the presentation shows the energy flows: 16,000 MJ of energy is contained in a tonne of stover; more than a fourth of it can be approved of as syngas from the pyrolysis process. The main objective however seems to be carbon dioxide capture, and biochar presents a viable alternative to other (more energy intensive) carbon sequestration technologies.

The diagram has a slight downwardish slope and some of the arrows have superfluous bends. Heat flows and heat recovery are in orange, losses in yellow, the feedstock and syngas in green.

Edit: I received a sample of biochar from a friend. Looks like small pieces of coal indeed. After taking the photo I disposed of the biochar in one of the flower pots on my balcony…

The first transport Sankey diagram shows the net tons of goods being transported on flatcars (either as trailer-on-flatcar, or container-on-flatcar) on the U.S. railway systems. The transport volume quantities are clustered into four groups shown with four different arrow widths. It is nice to see how in the eastern part you still have many railroad tracks, but with significantly less transport on them, while to the west coast you basically have 3 main lines, two of which carry more than 25 mio tons of freight per year.

The second one represents freight transport on railroad (bright red), inland waterways (blue) and national highways (dark red). Values also in million tons per year. I am not sure whether flows are to scale, or if transport quantities are also clustered into groups as in the first diagram. I can distinguish at least five different arrow magnitudes, even though only three sizes are given in the legend. A great transport Sankey diagram, as it shows that the East has most of the cargo, and has a much denser transport infrastructure. The reason why railroad transport on this second Sankey diagram differs so much from what is shown the first one, is probably due to the transport of bulk materials not shown in the intermodal transport quantity map.

Flows are not directional in both diagrams, so I assume that quantities for both directions have simply been added.

Can anybody confirm that the massive stream out of Wyoming by rail is coal?

I also checked out some other Austrian sites and found one for Austrian Energy Flows 2005 (Energieflussbild Österreich 2005) on the Austrian Energy Agency website. It is a little more colorful, and has more information too.

Flows are in TJ. The diagram is divided into four sections, namely “Aufkommen” (energence?), “Umwandlung” (transformation), “Sonst. Verwendung und Verluste” (other uses and losses), and “Endenergieeinsatz” (final energy use). The color code for the energy types is as follows: oil (pale orange), electric energy (red), coal (dark grey), gas (yellow), renewables (dark green), distance heating (light green), hydro (blue). On the right side useful energy is shown in purple, and losses are displayed as light grey arrows. (Thank you to my friend Leo for the translations…).

Yet another national energy flow Sankey diagram, and indeed a very beautiful one. Hope to see updates of it every year.

Unfortunately this copy of the diagram isn’t very large, and I have trouble reading and translating everything. Flows are in petajoule (PJ), source given is Statistics Austria.

On the left are imports, withdrawl from stocks, and domestic production. Losses branch off in black to the top. The diagram differs fundamentally from the ones I have presented for other coutries (such as for New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or the U.S.) in two ways:
First, it doesn’t show the energy use by sectors, but instead a breakdown by energetic end use (985 PJ), non-energetic end use (101 PJ), exports (150 PJ), stock increase (18 PJ), as well as energy use within the energy sector itself (81 PJ).
Second, the colors of the flows are used to differentiate between liquid fossil (dark blue), gaseous fossil (medium grey) and solid fossils (light bluegrey) rather than specific energy carriers. Furthermore biogenic energy flows are shown in medium blue, renewables in very light blue. Converted electric energy is in dark grey.

This is actually quite a nice idea to show the improvements resulting from a technical measure. The diagram on the left represents the original situation, while on the right it is seen in grey. The flow diagram for the new situation overlays the “old” diagram. Both are scaled to 1 kg of varnish applied to a workpiece (the green Sankey arrow), so the reductions in input quantity and emissions show the actual savings achieved.

It has a left-to-right orientation, with inputs from the left, and losses branching out to the top. Made with Matlab add-on m.DrawSankey from EPFL Lausannne.

In their energy audit reports, they always include a Sankey diagram in the very first chapter. Here is an example:

Other consulting companies, such as Pöyry (not sure how to pronounce this) haven taken on their approach and are also producing Motiva style Sankey diagrams.

Both Sankey diagrams designed in PowerPoint. Not bad at all, but probably quite a time-consuming task.

The report is about heat demand and CHP (Building a roadmap for heat. 2050 scenarios and heat delivery in the UK) and was prepared by University of Surrey and Imperial College for the Combined Heat and Power Association (CHPA). On p. 18 it has the following Sankey diagram. I have shown a similar diagram for the UK in this post.

Data is from the Digest of UK Energy Statistics. All flows are in millions of tonnes of oil equivalent (MTOE). Primary energy demand in 2007 was 237 MTOE.

The second Sankey diagram presented (on page 23) is a scenario for 2050. It was calculated using the MARKAL model.

One must read all the assumptions made for the model to be able to interpret it, but you can see immediately that the “energy system in 2050 is signifcantly altered under the common assumptions presented in all-electricity scenarios. In particular, final energy consumption in 2050 will be reduced by 46% against 2007 figures under the assumptions used in the CCC 80% CO2 reduction scenario”.

I invite you to read chapters 3.3. and 3.4 of the report to better understand the 2050 Sankey diagram. Note that the overall primary energy demand is significantly lower, but power generation almost doubles compared to the current situation. Losses from oil refineries are omitted in this scenario due to lack of data.

A great Sankey diagram by the research group made up from researchers from ICEPT (Imperial Centre for Energy Policy and Technology) and Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey.

This is a breakdown diagram, or ‘diagrama de brazos’, that shows the distribution of the overall cultural budget (182 Mio Euros in 2009) by sectors, sub-sectors, and even into individual types of activities or projects.

It somewhat reminds me of Nicholas Rapp’s AIG bailout diagram, even though less colorful…

Each branch of the diagram is labeled with the relative weight in percent, as well as the absolute value in millions of Euros. The color scale indicates the reliability of the data, either non detailed estimate (light grey), published estimate (grey), or published budgeted data (black).

- Here is the full diagram in large scale (PDF) with an additional breakdown of one particular section (Medialab) at another scale and full legend and annotations
- Watch a slide show to learn more about the diagram (starting p 19)
- And finally, a blowup detail of a diagram section: