User:Leowezy/Sandbox

Help:Making realistic energy networks

Fundamentals

Energy (literally) runs the world. Human civilisation arguably started with humans learning to purposefully use fire for clearing forests, cooking food, or mystic rituals. Today, all aspects of society and the build environment - and hence maps - are shaped by how we generate and use energy to extract resources, produce goods, and transport them and ourselves. Thinking about how energy is generated, distributed and used in your country is therefore a key but often overlooked aspect of realistic mapmaking. Below, I've written out some very incomplete and likely flawed guidance on how to get started thinking about these topics for your own mapping project.

First, let's get some terminology out of the way:

The terms energy and electricity are sometimes used interchangeably in everyday life, but they aren't. You use energy to heat your house, but that energy can come to your house in a tank truck as oil which is then burned, it can be delivered through long-distance heating from a nearby powerplant, or as electricity running an electric heater. Electricity is however a very versatile medium for energy distribution, as it can be generated from many sources, distributed at light-speed, and for almost all activities involving energy consumption.

As any physics teacher will be quick to point out to you, no form of energy, including electricity, is "created" or "produced" - energy can only be transformed from one state to the other, under the constraint of rising entropy. For the sake of this article's legibility, we won't get too hang up on this terminology.

Lastly, energy (and, hence, also electricity) consumption can be measures at various points between generation and use. For the sake of this simplified tutorial, we will only focus on two: energy production (EP), that is the energy leaving a power plant as electricity or oil from a refinery; and final energy consumption (FEC), that is the amount of energy the consumer is billed for, e.g. electricity. For many forms of energy transfer, losses between these two stages are negligible. If you extend your calculations beyond the reach of this tutorial however, e.g. calculate your nation's coal consumption, keep in mind that not all of the energy inside a piece of coal being burned in a coal powerplant makes it to the power grid in the first place.

Very commonly, energy consumption is recorded separately by sectors. The way statistics are recorded differs between countries, but a common definition differentiates between Transport, Industry, Households, and Services. Since the type of energy sources used differs strongly between these sectors and each country will have a distinct share of energy consumption per sector, we use these sectors as a starting point to estimate energy demand for your country.

Lastly, some physics. Energy is measured in Joule (expressed as [J], or [kg*m^2/s^2]). One joule is the amount of energy needed to lift ca. 102 g by one meter in earth's gravity, or heat one gram of water by 0.24 degrees Celsius. From your power-bill, you are most likely used to the unit Watt. Watt describes the rate of energy usage: one Watt means one Joule per second, or [J/s]=[kg*m^2/s^3]. On your power-bill, you will most likely see a price and consumption measures in Watt-hours, of [Wh]=[J/s*h]. One Wh is the amount of energy used if you consume energy at the rate of one Watt, for one hour. If you look at the SI notation carefully, you can see that Watt-hour is somewhat of a misleading unit: we first divide by time to get from Joule to Watt, and then multiply with time to get to Watt-hour. For this reason, we can always convert between Joule and Watt-hour: 1*Wh = 1*J/s*h = 1*J/s*3600s = 3600*J. The major reason the former notation is used in practice is that dishwashers, heaters and lights usually declare their consumption in Watt, meaning Watt-hour is easier to interpret for consumers. Lastly, all SI units can be exponentiated by 1000, one million, one billion, and one trillion using the prefixes kilo- [k], mega- [M], giga- [G], and tera- [T], respectively. For instance, one Giga-Watt-hour is 1,000,000,000 Wh, which in turn is equal to 3,600,000,000,000 J, or in short: 3.6 TJ.

Electricity production

general

individual chapters for each source

Other

Hydrogen (not source, but medium)

Fission