Month: August 2013

Samples

IEA’s Energy Sankeys for 100+ countries

A one stop source for energy balances from all over the world is this International Energy Agency’s (IEA) website. When accessed first time it shows the World Energy Balance for 2010. You can choose to view either the balance (primary energy to final consumption) or a breakdown to consuming sector for more than 100 countries and even for some regions.

Here is a static image deliberately chosen (Georgia 2010). Data in thousands of tonnes oil-equivalent (ktoe).

iea_country_energy-png

But the best thing is to actually browse these diagrams and interactively discover and compare them.

You can also watch the Sankey diagram develop over time (movie time line 1973 to 2010 for some countries). Check out, for example, Republic of China’s growing hard coal use for energy generation. Many additional options are available, such as legend, node details as pie chart, dragging nodes.

iea_sankey_help-png

Great tool IEA is providing to the community, making its vast energy data accessible in a clear, comprehensible and even playful manner.

Samples

2030 Hydrogen Energy Economy

From a lengthy article in German advocating a hydrogen energy economy in 2030. Losses (“Verluste” ) in red. Quantity labels (absolute/percentage) not used consistently on all arrows.

Comparison current Energy Scenario in Germany with 2030 Hydrogen Energy Economy (right)

sankey_losses-jpg

Comparison Biomass Methan Energy Scenario in Germany with 2030 Hydrogen Energy Economy

sankey_biogas-jpg

Could also be presented as pie charts, but author opted to do a simple breakdown using Sankey-style arrows.

General, Samples

Sankey Diagram using TikZ

Over at the TeX – LaTeX Stack Exchange (a Q&A site for users of TeX and LaTeX) this article explains “How to draw a Sankey Diagram using TikZ”. Okay, its a bit techie, but the results look good.

The original poster wanted to know how to draw a Sankey diagram using the TikZ package (TikZ is a “higher-level drawing language built on top of the PGF graphics framework”).

User Paul Gaborit came up with this example using TikZ and building his own sankeydiagram environment

how_to_draw_sankey_tikz-png

The interesting thing is that flows can fork and join, and that there is a check that the sum of quantities must be equal to the quantity of sankey node to fork.

This is how the the original sample Sankey diagram looks like with this solution.

sankey_energy_using_tikz-png

Very nice result. So for those out there used to working with TeX/LaTeX out this is actually a good solution.

Don’t miss to read the comments too (there’s one pointing to an alternative (Matplotlib and Sankey module).

Samples

Estonia House Energy Balance

Similar to the Sankey diagram shown in a post last week, the below Sankey diagram also shows the energy balance of a house. Found it on an Estonian blog.

house Sankey diagram

Unfortunately just a schematic Sankey diagram without figures or units. Energy “input” and losses. Looks to me like a hand drawn sketch. Valgustus is lighting, Kliimaseadmed is air conditioning, Hoone Küte is heating, and Soe Tarbevesi is warm water (thanks to Google Translate).

Samples

FRED Energy Flow Diagrams

1 Comment on FRED Energy Flow Diagrams

A number of renown partners such as DOE, NREL, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and more) have created FRED (FRee Energy Data). This interactive website allows visualizing energy data for all U.S. federal states. Here is a screengrab for California 2010:

fred_california_2010

Go to the website directly to experiment yourself. Here is how to proceed: To start, make sure the layers are turned on (button at the top left), then click on the federal state of your choice. In the pop-up window there are four visualization options: Energy Supply, Energy Demand, Energy Flows, and Energy Forecast. Choose ‘Energy Flows’ to produce the typical production/consumption Sankey diagrams. Hover over the bands to see more detail.

FRED is really intuitive and fun to use. And it is open-access. You have more options when you register. According to the About section, among the future planned developments of FRED are “expanding FRED’s US coverage to global, adding energy expenditures and C02 emissions data, and allow[ing] users to extract FRED data and graphics”. Good!

Samples

Sample Diagrams in e!Sankey

2 Comments on Sample Diagrams in e!Sankey

I am subscribed to different newsletters and RSS feeds to keep track of the Sankey diagram software market, trying to stay up-to-date on new software available or updated versions.

The latest release of e!Sankey (v3.2, the second one this year after v3.1 in January) seems to be mainly a bugfixing release. However, what’s nice is that they have included a number of new sample diagrams and templates.

This is a Sankey diagram depicting the energy balance of a family home.

building-energy-footprint-en-png

The one below has an interesting feature where balance differences (or as they call it: “stocks”) occur at a process, in a top-to-bottom direction.

processes-with-stocks-pro-version-en-png

Most samples feature a description panel, some of them a color legend for flows. There are more in the trial version. Nice