[ad_1]
It looks like the world being in fire and flood at the same time and final expert report indicates that we are almost short of time to avoid even more serious time climate change. All of this requires us to look for ways to reduce carbon emissions as quickly and economically as possible.
In this regard, some good news has been received when they recently released a paper examining how much individual power plants contribute to global emissions. The examination found that many countries have facilities that emit carbon dioxide above the national or global average. Closing the worst 5 percent of plants would immediately eliminate about 75% carbon emissions generated by the generation of electricity.
CARMA Review
It’s easy to think of energy generation in simple terms, such as “good renewable energy, bad coal”. To some extent, this assertion is correct. But it also compresses all energy creation, from being “somewhat bad” to being “really cruel”, in a single category. Numerous studies show that the situation is more complex. Depending on the harvest, many plants convert fossil fuels into power at different levels of efficiency. And some of the least efficient plants are networked during periods of high demand; otherwise, they are inactive and do not generate any emissions.
The interactions between these factors determine whether a particular plant is the main cause of emissions or simply the backbone of a country’s carbon output. If we were to make a global inventory of emissions and production at all plants, we could use that data to identify the worst offenses and make a list of targets for effectively lowering our carbon production.
Actually, we had one: emphasizing the past tense. Using 2009 data, someone created the Carbon Tracking Action Database or CARMA. Now, nearly a decade later, Don Grant, David Zelinka, and Stefania Mitova of the University of Colorado Boulder used 2018 data to build a CARMA update, providing data on emissions that are likely to be much more current.
The task was more difficult than it seemed. Some countries provide accurate emission data for each plant, so their data could be imported directly into CARMA. But not many others. For these countries, the researchers ranged from production data obtained by the International Energy Agency to the engineering specifications of individual plants.
When the researchers identified the largest sources of uncertainty in their data, they found that it was mostly concentrated in small plants, with the least impact on overall emissions. In large installations that can be important contributors, the data is usually very good.
The worst the worst
No one should be surprised that all the bad guys have coal factories. But the distribution of contaminating plants can be a bit unexpected. For example, even though it is a coal house, China it has only one plant in the 10 worst offenders. By contrast, South Korea has three on the list, and India two.
Overall, China does not have many factories that stand out extraordinarily badly, especially since many of its factories were built at the same time, in a huge boom in industrialization. Therefore, there is not much difference in plant-to-plant efficiency. In contrast, countries like Germany, Indonesia, Russia, and the USA see a lot of differences, so they are more likely to have very inefficient plants, which are foreign.
In other words, the authors analyzed the worst 5 percent of power plants that generated the amount of pollution in a country, categorized by carbon emissions. In China, the worst 5 percent was roughly a quarter of all emissions in the country. In the US, the worst 5% of power plants produced about 75% of the electricity sector’s carbon emissions. South Korea had similar numbers, while Australia, Germany and Japan found the worst 5 per cent of plants to be around 90% of carbon emissions in the energy sectors.
[ad_2]
Source link
