Talk:Energy balance (energy economics)

Energy balance for country or region

The IEA, and various national energy authorities, work with the concept of "energy balance". It is usually printed as a spreadsheet or table, and shows

1) How different types of energy is imported, exported and produced/extracted. The categories of energy could be: coal, crude oil, oil products, natural gas, nuclear, biomass, electricity and heat (here heat exclusively means district heating, e.g. heat as a medium, not the conversion from oil to heat at the point of consumption).

2) How different energy mediums are converted to others, eg crude oil to oil products, coal to electricity, biomass to heat. This part also shows the loss in the conversion processes.

3) How energy is consumed. E.g. for oil products, how much goes to road transport, rail transport, industry, residential, etc. The categorization can have both quite few and quite many categorizations.

IEA publishes a report every year, "Energy Balances of OECD countries", with such a table for each of the countries. It serves as a standardized way to represent the energy situation of a country. For academics and politicians working with this, the energy balance is a tool, for comparing countries in between, and over time.

Other authorities, eg the Danish Energy Agency, publishes one that is slightly different, more tailored for the Danish situation. Tools like LEAP (a software tool for modelling a country's energy situation) also creates (prints) an energy balance.

I think there should be a separate Wikipedia article for this concept. But I am not yet strong enough to write it. This comment is a start :)

192.38.5.154 (talk) 10:55, 21 May 2014 (UTC)