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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.

Final Energy Consumption (FEC) per sector

When thinking about energy production and consumption in your country, you can start by looking at the per-capita FEC of real-world countries similar to what you plan. The following table contains data converted from iea reports. If you know other sources, please let me know. You will likely have to research your own data if your country does not closely mirror any of the examples below.

	FEC per capita and year [MWh]
Country	Transport	Industry	Households	Services
China	2.6	9.3	3.1	0.8
Germany	7.4	7.5	7.6	3.8
Nigeria	1.1	0.4	1.3	0.2
US	21.2	9.6	9.4	7.3

Some things to consider when choosing per-capita FEC per sector for your country:

• How rich is your country? Energy consumption is almost directly (though not linearly) tied to GDP. A country where people struggle to pay for food will use only a fraction of the energy of a country where people have money left over to go on long car-trips and heat swimming pools.
• How cheap is energy overall? A country with plentiful cheap energy resources (e.g., US, Russia) will likely be less incentivised to save energy across all sectors than a country that has to import most of its enery sources (e.g. Germany, France)

• How important is energy-intensive industry (e.g., steel-works or chemical industry) for your country's economy? This will determine the amount of energy industry demands.
• How much do your people travel in every-day life, and do the do so mostly by train and bus, or by car, which uses more energy?
• What is the climate of your country like? Especially for households in cold or temperate countries, heating usually is the largest consumer of energy. Between countries with such a climate, the degree to which houses are insulated also makes a large difference. Countries in very hot regions, especially if rich, will in turn use a lot of energy for airconditioning.

For our example, let's assume you want to create a country "Nordica" with little heavy industry, but it's very rich, cold, and car-dependent. It has a population of 10 million people. Based on the table, let's assume a yearly per capita FEC of 13, 5, 11, and 4 MWh for transport, industry, households, and services, respectively. Multiplying with the population we arrive at total yearly FECs of 130, 50, 110, and 40 TWh for each sector.

Energy sources

After deciding on the sectors' yearly FEC values, we now think about what sources of energy are used by each sector to fullfill its demand. For example, transportation for the most part still runs on oil, but electric vehicles (including trains, although their contribution to total consumption is negligible due to their high efficiency in terms of energy/passenger) can also mean transportation consumes electricity. While some countries use electricity to heat, others use oil or gas (sometimes from a central power-plant through long-distance heating). The list goes on. Again, you will most likely have to take inspiration from real world countries that you try to emulate, and then diverge from that starting point. Note that electricity is of course not the "real" source of energy; electricity itself can be generated in oil, coal, or nuclear power plants, in wind turbines, solar cells, etc. But for the sake of this calculation, we just look at the way the energy arrives at the end consumer, and we'll worry about how that electricity is generated later. While this differentiation would not be needed to know just how much oil our country consumes, we do need this differentiation to know how many oil power plants and power lines we need.

Getting sector-specific data on energy sources (not just electricity) is challenging. Again, let's look at data from iea. We can see that in France, the majority of energy used by industry comes from electricity and gas. In China on the other hand, coal plays a much more dominant role. Go through some countries that you feel like are similar to "Nordica" and have a look at what share of their energy consumption in each sector comes from what source. Some things to think about:

• What sources are suitable for each sector? For transportation, oil and electricity are almost the only options. In industry, especially heavy industry, coal, oil and gas are often needed for intense heating processes and not easily replaced by electricity. Household heating can be done both through electricity and combustion processes. And services often are similar to households in terms of energy sources, since restaurants, offices and shops use energy in similar ways to residential buildings.
• What sources are cheap and available? If your country has gushing oil wells, it will likely try to use that oil.

Looking at real-world data, you will see that there are often some niche energy sources with little share, like biofuels and waste. You decide how detailed you want to get; don't be afraid to use a category "others". For Nordica, let's assume it's in the middle of transitioning from combustion engines to electric cars; the little industry it has is comparatively light and uses a lot of gas and electricity; and it's households and services use oil and gas for heating and electricity otherwise.

Lastly, we can add up the FEC of each energy source across sectors (right-hand column).

Nordica	Transport	Industry	Households	Services	Total
Total [TWh]	130	50	110	40	330
Electricity [%]	30%	40%	30%	40%
[TWh]	39	20	33	16	108
Coal [%]		5%
[TWh]		2.5			2.5
Oil [%]	70%	5%	30%	25%
[TWh]	91	2.5	33	10	136.5
Gas [%]		40%	30%	25%
[TWh]		20	33	10	63
Other [%]		10%	10%	10%
[TWh]		5	11	4	20

The most important output of this step (for now) is your total electricity consumption: 108 TWh per year (or, having time cancel with itself, 108TWh/year/(8766h/year) = 12.3 GW).

Electricity production

Electricity mix

Electricity can be produced in many different ways, borth renewable and non-renewable, and electricity mixed vary wildly across the globe.

power sources and energy mix

Load factor and grid loss

We want to calculate how much power plant capacity we need for each electricity source. But first, we need to clarify a few terms again.

The maximum power of a power plant is the maximum amount of energy it can put into the power grid per second. The average power is the amount of power that it actually outputs on average per second, over a whole year.

For some sources, these values are very close together. Nuclear power plants for example are very expensive to build and take a long time to spin up, so they are usually ran at full capacity and only shut down for maintenance. Solar on the other hand only produces its maximum power ouput on a sunny day during noon. For other sources, the ratio will depend on how the respective power source is used in that country; for example, hydro-electric and gas power plants can either be ran flat-out, or used to fill the gap when wind and solar are tanking, depending on the policy of your country. For wind and solar, load factor also depends on the climate. The ratio of average to maximum power is called load factor. The following list contains the values I used for Kojo. It is based on data from Germany and considers fossile fuels and hydro-electric power as very demand-responsive sources, as indicated by their low load factors. For your own country, these values can therefory vary.

Electricity source	Load factor [%]
Solar	15
Hydro	20
Oil	20
Wind	23
Gas	30
Biomass	50
Coal	50
Other	50
Nuclear	90

Also, we now can account for the difference between EP and FEC mentioned in the beginning: you need a little more power plant output than what your consumers use, because a seizable part is lost on the power grid. This depends on how technologically advanced your country is and how far power has to travel between source and consumer. As a rule of thumb, this grid loss should be between 5 and 10%.

calculation example

Typical power plant sizes

Nuclear

Climate neutrality is hard.

The/a future: Hydrogen

not source, but medium; industry, transportation

Fission