Zzzoot

I have been working with processing.js but wanted to learn a little about d3js for visualizations, so took a look at Mike Bostock 's d3.js plugin for making Sankey diagrams . So I pulled down two documents that had energy flow diagrams for Canada: 2006. Powerful Connections: Priorities and Directions in Energy Science and Technology in Canada. The Report of the National Advisor Panel on Sustainable Energy Science and Technology , Natural Resources Canada, p76. 2008. Report on Energy Supply and Demand in Canada Catalogue no. 57-003-X, Statistics Canada, p121. I extracted the data from these diagrams and built these interactive Sankey energy flows: 2003 Canadian Energy Flows 2007 Canadian Energy Flows Note that these two documents are looking at slightly different views of energy flows (and 2007 does not include Uranium ), so can't be compared directly. If you have any (preferably Canadian) datasets that could be presented in this fashion, let...

"*pybctc* is a python package that makes access to British Columbia Transmission Corporation (BCTC) electric data easier. The British Columbia Transmission Corporation is a crown corporation with a mandate to plan, build, and operate the province of British Columbia's electricity transmission system. It publishes valuable information on electicity generation, transmission, and consumption to its website. This information is useful for many purposes including economic analysis, power trading, electric system study, and forecasting. The first step in using such information is to download it an parse it into useful data structures - a task performed by this library. The processed data normally will feed statistical methods, heuristics, and system models to provide a useful analysis of the British Columbia electric system. The *pybctc* project is hosted at http://bitbucket.org/kc/pybctc The data this library accesses can be found here: B.C. Transmission Corp historical trans...

Bill St.Arnaud made the simple point today (in addition to a number of other interesting and important points) at the ISACC (ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada) meeting with respect to ICT and global change (which generalizes to all other industries and activities): Energy isn't the issue: carbon is the issue. If you have an energy expensive process, but all the energy comes from wind, solar, hydro (carbon neutral), that is OK. And energy efficiency doesn't really get you anywhere. I will be speaking this afternoon with the talk: " World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards for Industry and Governments ". Bill St Arnaud's blog .

The impact of ICT on the environment has very quickly become an issue, with such blogs as Bill St. Arnaud's Green IT/Broadband and Cyber-Infrastructure examining some of the issues. Linux has long been touted ( Linux-Ecology-HOWTO ) as greener operating system, mostly through its ability to run on older hardware or smaller hardware giving the same performance as other OSes. These combine in extending the useful lifespan of hardware, reducing the amount of ICT-based garbage. But Linux's power management for hardware is relatively poor, as compared to the Microsoft or Apple OS offerings. To remedy this, the Green Linux Workgroup was created in August 2007 to consolidate the efforts to improve Linux power management. At the same time, IBM anounced the " Big Green Linux" Initiative which includes the consolidation of servers. Their initial consolidation efforts include moving 3900 of their own servers to 30 System z mainframes running Linux. And the IBM's Linux Te...

I have been closely following the incandescent light vs. compact fluorescent light (CFL) debate ( BBC , /. , ABC , The Hindu ) which has moved into the legislatures of many provinces (here in Canada: Ontario , New Brunswick ), states (in the U.S.: California , ), countries ( Australia ) and regions ( EU ). I find this debate has interesting parallels to the software world, in particular the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) world. The light bulb debate has been focused on (banning) a particular implementation technology (incandescent) when it should be focused on metrics (i.e. the proposed "standards" say something like " any light bulbs except incandescents "). Instead of banning a particular technology you instead want to put in place sensible, reasonable metrics and apply these as your standard. In this case, the standard should be some combination of energy/light output efficiency (light output per energy input, perhaps in lumens / watt) and lumino...