Another runner-up in my private “Fancy Sankey Diagram” contest definitely is this Sankey diagram shown on a webpage of the Longford Environmental Alliance (LEA) from Ireland.
It visualizes the “Energy Balance for 2005 as a flow diagram showing our inputs from the left hand side and our outputs or usages on the right hand side.” It is a 3-D image, and kind of floats above the ground, although it doesn’t have a fancy shadow effect as this one does.
I have shown similar diagrams for California, Japan, Sri Lanka, Scotland and the U.S. before. In these national energy balances the various energy sources are shown as entries from the left, while consuming sectors (or the “sinks”) are displayed as output arrows. This Irish Sankey diagram distinguishes ‘Agriculture’ as a separate sector.
Well done Éire, home of late Mr. Sankey…
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October 6th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Here is the link to the original publication by SEI
(watch out, it might not detect the PDF type)
Energy In Ireland 1990-2005 (2006 report); PDF, 2MB
Energy in Ireland 1990 – 2004 (2005 report); PDF, 1,140KB
They didn’t publish the energy flow Sankey in the Energy In Ireland 1990-2006 (2007 report).
March 13th, 2009 at 7:31 am
I was contacted by the creator of this diagram a while back and he sent me some samples, because he made that diagram with the help of the old SankeyHelper v1.0 from 1999 (http://www.doka.ch/sankey1.htm). I could hardly believe it. Now, I don’t want you to get any ideas, SH1 isn’t as fancy as this picture suggests. SH1 is very basic and the author did a lot of editing in Adobe Illustrator, while maintaining the rather rigid layout principles of SH1 (He did eventually switch to the more recent SH v2 see http://www.doka.ch/sankey.htm). Still it’s an extraordinary example what a dedicated user can accomplish even with limited means.
July 11th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
An updated and original diagram for 2007 can be seen on
http://www.sei.ie/Publications/Statistics_Publications/EPSSU_Publications/Energy_in_Ireland_Key_Statistics/Energy_in_Ireland_Key_Statistics_2008.pdf pg. 7
But how in sam hall did they make this ? E-sankey doesn’t seem to do 3-d, I suspect that a graphic artist was behind it all.
/ Colm
July 14th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
[...] from carbontracking.com in a comment to this blog post on Energy Flows in Ireland pointed me to an updated version of this Sankey diagrams for [...]
July 14th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
@Colm: Thanks for pointing me to the updated version of this diagram. Here is the post.