How much does our energy cost?

Just a quick post to say I’ve added more context to the cost of energy in this blog post for the ‘Where Does My Money Go?‘ project.

Cost of UK energy infrastructure and the cost of mitigating climate change in 2008/09

A big part of my motivation for working on the ‘Where Does My Money Go?‘ (WDMMG) project was to learn more about the cost of the UKs energy system and the cost of mitigating climate change.

It is on the WDMMG project that I learnt about the Country Regional Analysis that HM Treasury publishes yearly to show the parts of the country that have benefit from UK public spending. I’ve separated out the energy infrastructure and climate change components of this report to show energy spending.

You can see the results of my investigation at my Many Eyes account.

Hopefully the cost I generated of £5830,000 for 2008/09 will give a good ball park figure for current spending on climate change and energy infrastructure.

Some Pictures As Promised

For a blog that claims to be about pictures showing the UK energy situation, you would be forgiven for thinking that this blog has not lived up to its name.

So I shall correct this right away with a round up of the UK energy visualisations I’ve found.

Energy Plan Maker by Barnaby Kent

It shows two bars, one for consumption one for demand. The visualisation allows the user to choose what each of the bars is made up from.

Sankey Flow Diagrams

Typically used to show the flow of resources from source to sink where the width of a stream is used to convey its magnitude.
The e-sankey website shows a number of examples of its use.
The example above is from this site and shows US greenhouse gas emissions by source.
This software is commercial and currently licenced at $99 per seat.

Renewables Map

This is a website that plots sustainable generators on a UK map and allows the user to drill down for more data on specific sites. Data comes from miscellaneous sources and its provenance is not shown. This technique could be used to cover energy sources more comprehensively.

There are more projects I could add now, and I will cover these projects soon, but this gives you some idea of the energy visualisation projects out there. If you have other projects you think should be added them please let me know in the comments.

LUKES data

I’ve created an energy data group for data sets that show UK energy use and supply and costs over at CKAN.

This group contains the obvious data sets including:

Dataset Name	Description	Time Period	Available?
DUKES	The Office of National Statistics yearly report that shows the life cycle of energy production, transformation and energy industry use through to final UK energy consumption.	We have DUKES for the past 60 years at least	In PDF
Low carbon transition plan for 2020	The Department of Energy and Climate Change’s plan for a 32% reduction from 1990 levels of carbon emissions, by 2020. All policy based planning, for emissions, including laws, regulations, investments and schemes.	2009 to 2020	In PDF.
UK government investment in energy infrastructure costs	HM Treasury’s Country Regional Analysis report spending codes that cover reduction in carbon emissions research, investment in low carbon and fossil fuel technology and workers support, transport, and protecting forestry.	Spending for the past 5 years at present.	In XML also in an open source data store with the Where Does My Money Go?

There are some neat relationships between these data sets that I will describe in another post soon.

Introduction to LUKES

I’ve called this project LUKES. It stands for Long Term UK Energy System.

The aim of this blog is to record and document UK energy supply, demand, carbon and other emissions and costs.

The way I will do this recording and documenting is by linking to cool visualisation projects and reporting on the relevant data sets.

Hopefully by collecting these visualisations and data sets in one place, we’ll get a sense of the bigger picture of how we’ve got our energy in the past, how we get our energy now and how we can plan to get our energy in the future.