How to Use Sector Trace

 Sector Trace: Embodied Electricity Analysis

Quantify and trace the embodied electricity impact across your supply chain.

What is Sector Trace?

Sector Trace is an interpretation tool that calculates the total amount of electricity consumed anywhere in your product’s supply chain—not just at the top level—and shows how that electricity contributes to your selected impact category.

Electricity use is often buried many levels deep in a supply chain. A single manufactured component may pull in electricity from its own suppliers, their suppliers, and beyond. Sector Trace surfaces all of these contributions in one place, ranked and visualised so you can see which parts of the system are driving the most impact.

Why use Sector Trace in XYCLE?

Conventional hotspot analysis is limited to the level at which you’ve modelled your system. If significant electricity use occurs upstream—in a tier-2 or tier-3 process—it’s easy to miss.

Sector Trace removes that ceiling. It:

• Traces embodied electricity through the full upstream supply chain, regardless of depth
• Quantifies electricity in kWh and its impact
• Highlights hotspots visually so they’re immediately apparent relative to the rest of the system
• Lets you adjust contribution thresholds to focus the view or go exhaustive

This makes it straightforward to identify where further data collection or decarbonisation effort would have the most impact, and to share those findings with colleagues.

Before You Begin

Sector Trace works on a product or system that already has an LCI and LCIA. If you’re still building or reviewing your inventory, complete that before proceeding. It is designed to work best with ecoinvent data.

Running an Analysis

1. Open the relevant product in XYCLE and click the Visualisation tab in the top left corner.
2. Select Sector Trace from the analysis type dropdown at the top of the left-hand panel.
3. XYCLE calculates embodied electricity across your entire upstream supply chain. The visualisation appears within a few seconds.

The chart is a Sankey diagram showing a hierarchical breakdown of electricity contributors. A summary bar above the diagram shows the total embodied electricity (kWh), total impact for the selected impact category, electricity’s share of total system impact, and the number of nodes and supply chain tiers included. These totals reflect only the nodes visible under the current threshold settings and update as you adjust them.

Each node in the diagram displays:

• The process or sector name
• The amount of electricity attributed to it (kWh) and its impact in the selected impact category
• Its depth within your supply chain

Nodes are colour-coded by their role in the supply chain:

The diagram flows from left to right, with your product on the left and electricity sources furthest upstream on the right.

Hovering over a node shows its per-parent contribution and share of the total system, so you can quickly assess relative significance.

Adjusting Contribution Thresholds

Two threshold controls let you broaden or narrow the analysis:

To adjust a threshold:

1. Open the Threshold controls in the Sector Trace panel.
2. Enter a new value. The visualisation updates immediately.
3. To see the full picture with the least filtering, reduce both thresholds. The per-parent threshold can be reduced to 0%.

N.b. there is a minimum of 1% on the cumulative threshold to ensure performance.

Thresholds control visibility, not the underlying calculation. Lowering a threshold reveals additional nodes; it does not change the values assigned to visible ones.

Exporting Results

You can export the current view in two formats.

Image (PNG)

Download a chart image:

1. Click Export in the Sector Trace toolbar.
2. Select Export as PNG.

The exported image reflects the thresholds currently applied—only nodes visible in the chart are included.

Spreadsheet (XLSX)

Download a tabular export of the current view:

1. Click Export and select Export as Excel.
2. XYCLE generates an .xlsx file containing, for each visible node:
   • Inventory item name
   • Amount of electricity (kWh)
   • Impact in the selected impact category
   • Region
   • ISIC classification
   • Supply chain depth
   • Relationship to the exported product

The export reflects the thresholds set at the time of export. If you want a more complete export, reduce the thresholds first, then export.