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rjbergerud / Super-Sankey-CAN-Energy-Flows

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Summary data from nrcan site doesn't percentage breakdowns we have for electricity sources #10

Open rjbergerud opened 3 years ago

rjbergerud commented 3 years ago

nrcan site What matches: [x] Hydro [] Natural Gas

Nrcan value for for electricity from NG is 0.094*641 =~ 70 TWh. 1 Wh = 3600 Joules, so ~25e5 Terajoules, which differs from the sum of these two columns from
Natural gas Transformed to electricity by utilities 416266 TERAJOULE
Natural gas Transformed to electricity by industry 287631 TERAJOULE
rjbergerud commented 3 years ago

25/70 = 0.35, which is close to the average efficiency of natural gas plants at about 45%. Likely that terajoules here represents the energy of the input fuel, not the output electricity, and we should have a waste flow coming out of this node. So the representation (and data) we have is correct if we consider the energy flow through electricity as the combined energy inputs to produce electricity. However, it's misleading since most people at first glance will look at the width of the flow and interpret that as the amount of electrical energy produced.

What could be done instead is immediately split off the natural gas losses as a separate flow exiting the first electricity node.