Tag: energy

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Energy Embedded in Water

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.

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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?”

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SOPA 2013 Award: Wiring the City

Simon Scarr has won a SOPA 2013 Award for Excellence in Information Graphics (PDF, see p. 13) with this Sankey diagram titled ‘Wiring the City’ originally created for the South China Morning post.

It shows energy flows and energy use in Hong Kong

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On his blog he writes: “… we took a look at Hong Kong’s power consumption. Who uses all the electricity in our city and what is it used on? (…) Data set was provided by the government’s Electrical and Mechanical Services Department. (…) This type of chart is known as a Sankey diagram. The thickness of each line reflects a value. In this case, an amount of electricity in terajoules. All of the lines add up to give subtotals and totals by users (grey) and end use (coloured).”

Congratulations, Simon!

Methodology, Samples

Building Energy Measuring and Modelling

This article on ‘A Pilot for Measuring Energy Retrofits’ describes how researchers from the EEB Hub used an old navy building in Philadalphia to “determine detailed system performance”.

EEB Hub researchers outfitted Building 101 with sensors and a data acquisition system to determine detailed system performance, building energy loads, indoor environmental quality (IEQ), and a detailed operation of the building control system. … The sensors read data from 509 sensing points, collecting 1,048 pieces of data at one-minute intervals. These data points track indoor air quality, occupant comfort, and building energy use.

The result of that “inverse modelling” (i.e. measuring) approach are presented in Sankey diagrams and are used “to identify discrepancies in the predicted versus actual energy balance”.

There are significant differences between the January energy use…

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… and the energy picture in July

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While in winter mainly natural gas is used for heating, the gas consumption in summer is down. In July electricity consumption is significantly higher due to air conditioning.

Unfortunately no unit of measurement is given (it could be kWh), but nevertheless proportions of the energy flows are correct.

Read full article.

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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).

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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.

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

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FRED Energy Flow Diagrams

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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:

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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

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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.

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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.

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

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Energy Flows in a Desalination Plant

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From a 2006 EU-funded research project called ADU-RES, here is a Sankey diagram from one of their reports (p. 24).

It features the energy flows of an autonomous desalination unit based on renewable energy. The plant (ITC’s Dessol) where they gathered the data is on the Spanish Canary Islands. “The system is conceived for small settlements (1-1500 inhabitants), since the scale/cost factor of the required investment/land restricts the capacity of production installed to 100 m³/day”.

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The figures represent annual average specific energies in kWh per m³ of desalinated water (or pumped seawater?).