A Sankey diagram says more than 1000 pie charts
This Sankey diagram of energy flows in a “pusher type reheating furnace” illustrates an article on ‘Reheating Furnaces in Steel Plants’ by Satyendra on the ISPAT Guru blog.
Unit of flow is not clear, but the main stream arriving from the top represents the baseline 100% (508 units) of which a portion can be recuperated and fed back into the furnace as preheated air.
From the Swiss Energy Statistics for 2005 published by BFS comes the following Sankey diagram.
Flows are in GWh. The large pale streams on the left are imports and exports. The vertical bands are domestic energy production (different types of electricity generation) at the top. A breakdown of the consuming sectors is shown in the lower part.
Will try to dig out a more recent energy balance for Switzerland to compare.
A web page of the federal german ministry for Environment, Climate and Energy in Baden-Wurttemberg informs companies about energy efficiency. Sankey diagrams are described as a useful instrument to detect hotspots for improvement and a tool in the framework of energy efficiency analysis.
The Energy Education References Wiki has a page on Sankey diagrams. It features many samples, snippets and links directed at teachers.
One image in particular caught my attention. This is described as “Energy Display System” created by CSIS in the 70s
You all know those national energy flow Sankey diagrams I show here regularly? Now imagine the same type of image as a series consecutive frames for several years. This would produce a kind of animated gif or movie showing changes over time.
The above must be an early 3D version of this. The diagrams are mounted on what seems to be acrylic glass…
Funny post on German blog “Trinklaune” by Robin Stein. He suggests using Sankey diagrams to control loss of spirits in a pub. Apparently this was kind of a student project.
Here we see the Sankey diagram for a Negroni cocktail made up from equal parts of Gin, Campari and Vermouth rosso.
On every bottle a certain quantity is lost. This is probably because bartenders put in more spirit than they should, or offer free drinks, or maybe just drink it themselves…
As we can see in this figure, losses can add up considerably in a bar that serves several drinks.
A 2002 Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) report on energy efficiency by UK’s Environment Agency features the following Sankey diagram on page 10.
It shows energy flows in a paper mill. Unfortuntately no values are given nor a unit. So this is to be considered merely as a schematic diagram, not necessarily based on real energy data.
The guidance document explains (p.9):
“It is useful to supplement energy consumption information with energy balances (e.g. “Sankey” diagrams, other flow diagrams or descriptions) to illustrate how energy is used throughout the process (see Figure 2.1). This is particularly relevant where energy conversion is highly integrated within the activities, in order to illustrate any inter-dependencies between energy use and selection of other operational or environmental control measures.”
After presenting the energy balance Sankey diagrams for Guatemala and Costa Rica in recent posts, here is a similar diagram for Mexico. Flows are in Petajoule (PJ) for 2011.
Found this also in the INCyTDE blog post mentioned before.
David Wogan at the Scientific American blogs that “Over 12 percent of all U.S. energy consumption is directly related to water”. This was identified in a 2012 study by researchers of UT Austin.
The values in this Sankey diagram are for 2010 in trillion BTU. Energy is used for direct and indirect water services such as steam generation.
The author argues “The study also identifies an interesting policy issue: roughly 25% more energy is used to heat, cool, or pump water than is used for lighting (in the residential and commercial sectors) in the United States – about 5 quads. So why are more efficiency policies and technologies targeted towards lighting and not water conservation?”