Sankey Diagrams

The first Sankey diagrams in Thai language I have come across are from a management summary on “Alternative Energy and Energy Conservation in ACMECS countries”. It shows how much biomass from wood industry, rice mills and other sources is available in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos as rejects, and could potentially be used for generating energy. All values in tons per year for 2004 or 2005, extrapolated to the whole country from 4 to 6 samples.

Wood Industry: pink arrow is for sawdust, dark yellow arrow for woodbits, summing up to roughly 25%

Rice Mills: green arrow is for rice bran, yellow arrow for husks, summing up to 40%

Corncobs: orange arrow (20%) is corncob reject that could potentially be used for energy generation.

Even though I don’t read or write Thai, I love those letters. For those of you who wish to read the summary in English (with only 2 Sankey diagrams), a translation is available. Update Nov 2008: Unfortunately the website http://www.dede-acmecs.com has gone offline

Do you know what country uses the top level domain “.lk”? Well, I didn’t know it either, until I came across this fine Sankey diagram of the energy flows of Sri Lanka on the website of the country’s Energy Conservation Fund. This island country (formerly known as Ceylon) has some 20 million inhabitants.

The flows in this Sankey diagram are in ‘kTOE’ (TOE = tons of oil equivalent). It shows that most of Sri Lanka’s energy in 2003 came from domestic biomass, the second largest domestic source is hydro power. Imported sources of energy are crude oil (refined in the -currently- sole Sri Lankan oil refinery), petroleum and a small portion of coal.

On the consumption side the largest energy using sector is domestic/commercial, followed by industry (using biomass generated energy as well) and transportation.

Transmission losses are relatively small compared to the situation in other countries. The energy flow picture of Sri Lanka thus is quite different to those I have previously presented here on this blog, such as for the U.S. or for Scotland.