According to this article just 5% of the world’s power plants account for almost three-quarters of carbon emissions from electricity generation.
I think this may be one of the most encouraging bits of news about AGW that I've seen in a long time. 5% of electric power plants (about 1500 plants) is a lot, but it's a manageable lot. This gives us a clearly defined area of attack with a very high ROI. It seems to say: if we're going to get serious about saving ourselves, start here and go all in. The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants... unsurprisingly many of them are in China and India, but at least one is in Germany. If Germany wants to set an example, there's where to start.
> The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants... unsurprisingly many of them are in China and India
And China isn't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North Americans and Europeans can't compete.
Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
We should look at countries like Australia, they are among the worst with no reason to be. China has a still growing economy and while they continue to bring coal online they are the world's leading solar producer and have heavy investment into bringing more nuclear online.
Contrast this with Australia that is a fully developed economy, has the easiest location to install and generate solar, has tons of uranium in the ground that it doesn't have a single reactor to use, and still burns and ships coal to act as an enabler to other coal burning nations.
Sure, but China doesn't appear to be short-sighted.
In 10 years will this be the case? Nuclear takes a long time to bring online, they've at least got the process in motion and reasons to be polluting right now. Polluters like Australia don't and that's my point.
Or maybe it'd be better that China stops producing renewable technologies for the rest of the world? One big area I see them improving is with use of electric vehicles. Can't do EV's if your grid can't supply the energy. Should they push gas and diesel vehicles instead for the next decade or two?
> Or maybe it'd be better that China stops producing renewable technologies for the rest of the world?
I don't understand the dichotomy here. Is the argument that China's production of solar panels is a primary driver of China's pollution and thus cutting pollution in China would significantly hamper their ability to produce PV for the world? That seems dubious to me if I understand it correctly?
Let's make it easy then: Without coal as a large % of base load they'd have to shut down a good amount of their manufacturing and focus on putting less EV's on the road until they could replace the base load lost from shutting off all their coal production. China is #10 on the list of natural gas reserves, far below what the US or Russia has. At their current consumption they are anticipated to run out in a little over 20 years. I do not think it is a viable strategy to throw tons of natural gas online and rely on Russia when it runs out.
Literally nothing the Chinese do with energy policy right now will appease the west. If they put in more hydro for wind/PV storage western press would print headlines about how the big bad CCP flooded over some villages and are destroying their environment.
And it's still well below Japan in per capita emission. Japan is quite an advanced green economy.
I don't think any reason to put China front and center in this discussion "who should start closing coal power plant".
Edit:
> Focusing on per-capita data inevitably leads to whataboutism
Well, energy usage is a key indicator of human wellbeing. I see no reason this leads to whataboutism. It's a key part of the discussion. Without this, humans are not going to unit in full strength.
> that's exactly the narrative the CCP wants to push!
CCP lifted 600MM+ people out of poverty. I guess they can make a few correct statement, right?
> But when looking at emissions over time, it becomes pretty obvious that some countries are working hard doing their parts while some others are simply polluting at an accelerating pace.
Yes, we can clearly see that China committed to carbon neutral at the critical juncture of economy development [1], and the only large developing country. And we are waiting India [2]. Meanwhile, despite enjoying the most from the carbon emission industry in 20 century, the advanced & developed country continuously insist on equal responsibility for all nations. It's like I eat most of the lunch, and grow so big, now I say that everyone on the table should cut their food consumption by certain percentage... Not fair.
>And it's still well below Japan in per capita emission.
I upvoted you but I didn't dunk on Japan because they do have nuclear energy and are a resource poor nation. They are also the only nation to have legitimate concerns over nuclear technology for reasons I shouldn't have to explain.
>Meanwhile, despite enjoying the most from the carbon emission industry in 20 century, the advanced & developed country continuously insist on equal responsibility for all nations.
This is the core point! I'm making the case that there's a reason they are emitting lots of carbon right now, and unlike many other nations that don't have a reason nor a plan to get off carbon, they do have one. China was practically an agrarian society up until the 1980's, the west squandered a 200 year carbon-burning head start and is painting them as the bad guys.
> And it's still well below Japan in per capita emission
For how long?
> I don't think any reason to put China front and center in this discussion "who should start closing coal power plant".
Focusing on per-capita data inevitably leads to whataboutism, and that's exactly the narrative the CCP wants to push! But when looking at emissions over time, it becomes pretty obvious that some countries are working hard doing their parts while some others are simply polluting at an accelerating pace.
I understand the case for tariffs or even sanctions (though western nations should obviously get their own houses in order first), but how would immigration quotas make any difference? Do governments care at all where their citizens are allowed to emigrate to? I don’t see why they would.
Rich Chinese are obsessed with acquiring western passports. Making it harder will incentivize them to work harder at home to fix their country's horrible environmental record.
If you do that then the price of Solar PV will skyrocket back up. The key reason we've seen Solar PV prices plummet is because we've seen an increasing amount of manufacturing move to China, now 80% of solar PV are manufactured their.
It takes a tremendous amount of resources and energy to make solar pv and the only way to do it cheaply is to do it someplace that doesn't mind burning lots of coal to extract and process the necessary resources to build them.
Though to be fair, high tariffs that reduced Chinese production would hurt the global economy, which is the only demonstrated method we've seen to reduce emissions. This could be the best path way to improving emissions, but I suspect many people would be unhappy with consequences.
A lot of the talk of China seems just to be racism, but as long as we're talking about carbon-based tariffs then they're good for everyone, including China to be subject to them. They can introduce carbon pricing internally and use the solar they make to decarbonize the solar production, win-win-win.
> Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation
This is why I think a carbon tax with border adjustment would be pretty awesome. The border adjustment is the bit that levels the economic playing field between polluting and clean countries.
Yep with the worst offenders being in countries that don't care, not a lot that can be done unless you feel it's worth going to war over (I don't think it is).
> And China isn't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North Americans and Europeans can't compete.
I thought that Trump was all about building more coal? Didn't it work out?
It maybe slowed down decommission of existing power plants, but nobody would build a coal power plant today from scratch in the west. These things last for a generation, while an administration 8 years at most.
> Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
Sure, let's have a tariff on goods made in a country, that scales proportionately to the per-capita CO2 emissions in it.
The United States would be one of the most heavily tariffed countries in the world, if we go down that road. China would be... Middle of the pack.
> Sure, let's have a tariff on goods made in a country, that scales proportionately to the per-capita CO2 emissions in it.
Again the obsession over per capita data, which totally obscure the fact that the US per capita emissions have been in a constant decline over the last 20 years while China's have been growing at an uncontrolled pace.
Which behavior should we incentivize, unrestrained pollution because they "aren't THE worst yet" or hard work curbing emissions?
A constant decline when they started at an incredibly high starting point still puts it at much worse than other countries.
I don't care about 'trying' or 'trends'. I care about current results. That's the behaviour we should incentivize. Results. Not 'projected results maybe 20 years from now.'
Oh, and by the way, China's per-capita emissions peaked in ~2013, and have been ~slowly declining since then. [1] If current trends continue without any change, it's going to take another 24 years for the US to hit their level of emissions. [2]
It's odd that whenever people grouse about China's emissions, they never make note of either of those two facts...
The climate doesn't care which datapoint you cherry-picked your starting and ending ratios from. It cares about the current rate of emissions.
I really should not have to explain on this forum that when you multiply two numbers together, the values of both multipliers matter. Seven times nearly-nothing is not very much. Point-seven times a lot is... Still a lot. It's basic arithmetic.
The climate doesn't care about per capita. It's strictly the emissions. If you want to care about per capita numbers you should also care about human development index numbers. It's not the same thing to put 20 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while doing nothing the quality of life of the global population as compared to putting 20 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while raising the standard of living the global population. We should be striving for lowering CO2, but let's not pretend that all emissions are the same.
The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do. And solving climate change involves a global effort, but if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global south who never had a chance at a first world lifestyle, they'll just tell you to screw yourself. You want to insist on bringing your accumulated centuries of carbon emissions onto the lifeboat, while telling everyone else to impose quotas on their luggage, then they'll be happy to drag you to the bottom together.
If you don't want to take per-capita emissions into account, and want to look at absolute numbers, then the US has an even smaller carbon budget to work with - and its way exceeding it.
But okay, let's look at per-capita development times quality of life, instead. (China is ~15% behind the US on the latter - does that mean that its per-capita budget should be dropped by a comparative 15%? It's still doing well by that metric.)
You must realize that development is only possible because of access to energy, services, and material goods. Cut the energy, transportation, and services available to the average American by a factor of 3, as a proxy for bringing it's emissions profile down to China's, and tell me - what will happen to its quality of life?
(My prediction is - a sharp decline, followed by a bloody revolution.)
Fossil fuel's use in German power production is falling faster than their nuclear mix is. They never "went back to coal". In reality renewables now account for almost double nuclear's output at its peak.
They can thanks Sweden, Finland, France and a few other neighboors to provide them with plenty of electricity and hydraulic backup when they need it (no wind at night).
France is sending around 2 to 4 GW of electricity (so mostly nuclear) to Germany all the time, "except" when there is plenty of wind, then France is buying for a really cheap price (sometimes negative) what Germany can't use. See https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-...
2 to 4 GW is roughly 2 to 4 nuclear reactors at 100%, so one/two nuclear powerplants "on an average usage".
You can't say that you exited nuclear (or any other kind of energy) when you're massively, and really often, importing electricity from this source from across the borders.
And your graph is pretty clear. Germany didn't "removed fossil fuel", they replaced around 100GW of coal with 50GW of natural gas + renewable. To me natural gas is still a fossil fuel (with a lighter co2 impact than coal indeed).
And in the end the result is https://www.electricitymap.org/map 5 to 10x more CO² impact than France per kwh, even with 2x the nuclear plants setup in France (60GW of nuclear in France against 60GW of wind turbines and 60GW of solar panels in Germany).
Cross-border electricity is what the future will look like though, it's not like it matters if the energy was generated in Germany or Finland when I turn on the lights at home.
It definitely does if your neighbor decides they need extra money and jacks up the rates and/or doesn’t like you anymore and shuts it off. Then it is whoever has the most self contained power wins.
I don't think the scenario you describe is a realistic scenario within the European energy market. Prices are decided by supply and demand and the market is getting more interconnected so single points of failure become less likely.
I do wonder what happens in case there is no wind and no sun all over Europe and the demand is higher than the supply. It's probably very unlikely to happen but then countries will prioritize their own citizens (as we saw now during the covid crisis) and then we could have blackouts. I assume scenario's like these have been researched but I don't follow this subject, maybe someone else here knows?
Yes, on the open european electricity market, electricity coming from renewable have the priority "on injection" on the grid above all the other sources of electricity.
So when you have spikes of renewable productions (a lot of wind and a lot of sun) Germany sells it to "everyone around" at a really cheap price. Which means that on a yearly average Germany indeed exported a lot of cheap renewable electricity to everyone.
Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?
> Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?
What will happen is that people will learn to build an energy system that works well with this situation.
Which will likely mean things like industrial plants that shut down when electricity is scarce and get payed for that by the grid operator, because that's cheaper than having a lot of storage. It will mean new industries will be built by using excess renewables (likely hydrogen will be such an industry). I'm excited to see that happen.
Well, they're cheaper than all other forms of electricity. The cost of renewables is mostly capital expenditure. If you have spare you might as well export it and you can probably underbid any other form of power.
France is also leaning rather heavily on the capital expenditures it made on nuclear power in the 80s. Unfortunately its gonna be in for a whopping bill when its plants start aging out in 2025: https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...
Germany, OTOH, will be able to coast on what it's already built in the next 10 years while the rest of Europe plays catch up.
The current Germany infrastructure total cost is around 500B€ in 20 years. That's for sure a few brand new nuclear power plants, or a few big investment plans in power efficiency (heat pumps, isolation…).
Wind turbines lifespan is around 25 years (some 30 years), mostly limited by structural and physical issues. You can't reinstall a new wind turbine on top of an old one (the concrete base is also fragilized and new turbines are often way bigger than old ones).
Solar panels indeed have a way better lifespan and recent ones stay efficient even after decades of use.
So one question now: why is Germany building and importing so much natural gaz (~400g of CO²/kwh, it's around 10 for renewable/nuclear) if their renewable plan is working so well ?
>Well, they're cheaper than all other forms of electricity. The cost of renewables is mostly capital expenditure
There is a cost to renewables that most advocates don't factor in - balancing. Most studies use the prevailing market rates for energy to prove that renewables are cheaper than coal or gas however, when renewables aren't providing power, something is and that something has a cost.
This is a cost paid for by consumers though it isn't attributed to the source of the problem - the variable renewable generators.
Similar argument for energy storage. You need storage precisely because renewables are variable and that cost should be factored in to the cost of renewable energy. At the moment, it isn't.
>however, when renewables aren't providing power, something is and that something has a cost.
Hence all that electricity imported from, e.g. France in winter. Some people might be under the illusion that this was free but I can assure you I am not.
There's a reason Europe is super keen on country interconnectors. It really helps smooth out production.
Intermittency of renewables really has become the next Y2k. I suppose we can thank a decade of carbon and nuclear lobby fearmongering for that :/
Like Y2K as a problem it receives relatively too much attention relative to the problems it causes. The rolling blackouts germany was promised ~10 years ago never materialized, for instance:
Pretty easy to solve. We know that electricity can go around the Earth 7 times in a second. Now, if Germany has excess electricity during the day, they can simply pospone that electricity by wrapping a long cable 302 400 times around the globe (12h * 3600s/h * 7/s = 302 400). During the day they feed the excess electricity into one end of the cable, and then 12 hours later at night, electricity comes out the other end at just the right time, when they need it!
IIRC, antopodal HVDC would have resistive losses of either 70% or 30% — I’d have to recalculate from scratch to find out which, but it doesn’t matter much either way: the real issues are “How much does the line cost?” and “what are the political implications of that size power line in all the places it has to pass through?”
Batteries and HVDC to your nearest major desert are what I expect to be the solutions.
The following claims HVDC transmission losses of 3.5% per 1,000 km @ 800kV, therefore 20,000 km is 100% - ((100% - 3.5%)^20) ~= 51% loss; I guess my previous calculations were a different voltage, but as I’m asserting that even the difference between 30% and 70% doesn’t matter, neither does this :)
Total CO2 emissions drop even further, and we get incrementally closer to a world where anthropogenic climate change is a global catastrophe as opposed to a global extinction event?
> France is sending around 2 to 4 GW of electricity (so mostly nuclear) to Germany all the time
False. In reality Germany often has a trade surplus with France. See, every country has multiple interconnects, and various areas send and receive power. On the whole, Germany sends more power to France than France sends to Germany. Which makes sense -- France's total power production is far below its peak power demand, and as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very often offline. But sure, one area of Germany imports from France while another area exports to France...that isn't notable.
You're regurgitating ridiculous pro-nuclear propaganda. Telling that your argument has completely shifted between posts.
"Germany didn't "removed fossil fuel""
Who are you quoting? Further, Germany started their nuclear decommissioning in 2011. Natural gas + coal + lignite is *WAY* below that level now.
>And in the end the result is https://www.electricitymap.org/map 5 to 10x more CO² impact than France per kwh, even with 2x the nuclear plants setup in France (60GW of nuclear in France against 60GW of wind turbines and 60GW of solar panels in Germany).
Germany had a much dirtier power profile before they started decommissioning nuclear reactors. They have a much, much cleaner profile now, even if it still isn't as clean as France's. The "went back to coal" nonsense is ridiculous noise.
EDIT: I would love to know what's going on in the minds of people who downvote comments like this. Just upset with fact and reality?
>So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar panels
This is a pretty facetious comparison. You install solar knowing that the sun won't shine all the time, and turbines that the wind won't blow. No one installs it expecting 100%. The cost to install is low.
Nuclear, on the other hand, is a massive capital expenditure. When nuclear is down, that is a major problem because you don't overbuild. An unplanned outage can be a disaster.
This whole conversation is a bit rich given that many of France's reactors are nearing EoL and France has no plans on replacing them.
Regardless, I soundly and overwhelmingly debunked the nonsense that Germany "went back to coal" so now it's on with strawmen and shifting goal posts. Such is always the nature of any discussion involving the magical panacea of nuclear.
France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by political "no-decision". And indeed now we are reaching the point where we don't have the knowledge and industrial level to "jump back" into the flow.
Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;) Germany is indeed planning to phase out coal "by 2035" (lets see how this goes, there is an election going on). Germany is currently building natural gas plants on the other hand. Gaz that is mostly (around 45%) imported from Russia, a nice diplomatic thing they're getting into.
"France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by political "no-decision"."
Bullshit. Nuclear died outside of China because it was oversold and an economic calamity. You can't even install nuclear without massive government subsidies (not least a huge liability waiver where the state basically takes on all liability, not done for any other energy source). The cost to build, operate, retrofit and decommission is always massively over the expected, and it has only gotten worse.
There are places where nuclear is by far the best option, and its extreme costs and safety needs are acceptable. There are many others where it just never yielded the promise.
"Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;)"
That is the root of this thread that you jumped into, making several seriously wrong claims that you either just shifted goal posts or edited out along the way.
"This is a pretty facetious comparison." Is it? A few weeks ago I noticed that the wind in my state was below 5mph over the entire state, for the entire day, with temperatures in upper 90's. You literally can't overbuild wind enough to account for this.
Add in that the latest nat-gas installation in my state from start to finish cost 1/4th the price of our last wind turbine installation, if you compare actual power produced over the year instead of simply comparing max rated production.
That's when I realized that you literally can't have enough wind to replace CO2 producing power and nuclear is the only reasonable answer.
Who am I to believe? The published costs of installations coupled with power company records or studies which don't look anything like real world data, but always unerringly tell me wind is cheaper.
I based my opinion on real world data, and only real world data could change it. Maybe that sounds ridiculous where you're standing, but I'll never know.
And like my man Richard Feynman would say if he were alive today, p-hacking, cargo culting, and outright fraud are alive and well - endemic in the life or death sciences - and super-saturating the more politicized sciences. Takes 5 minutes to get a rough estimate of something to see if a study is even close to being accurate. Try it. Pick a small wind market in ideal conditions, pick an established utility with public records, and do the work yourself.
The implication here being that air conditioning will be using lots of power? Surely using solar PV for air conditioning is the most obvious pairing out there. It's rarely hot and not sunny.
No, I didn't confuse them. How, exactly, does a nuclear power plant design prevent being offline?
You understand they have to take the plant offline to do major maintenance, even refuelling, right? In April, 75% of New England's nuclear power plants were offline, for instance, most unplanned.
When a single plant costs billions of dollars and becomes a significant or overwhelming contributor to an area's power mix, it can be a problem.
The tone of your replies is needlessly aggressive.
A typical nuclear plant isn't designed to be cycled regularly. What you are suggesting is that most nuclear plants are not generating power for more than 50% of the time.
A cursory search of capacity factors will show that this is the opposite of reality. A typical wind or solar installation on average, generates zero power for more than half the time.
And that's exactly why you have several nuclear reactors in a plant and several turbines, and several power lines…
Please be a bit serious about what you're saying, you don't have to actually turn of a plant when you need to refuel. If any kind of plant (including hydro) need to be completely turned off for maintenance its really because you had a major design flaw.
Most of the nuclear power plants that Germany built were single-reactor plants and would shut down for refueling. Multi-reactor plants will stagger shutdowns so that the plant continues to generate at reduced power. It is the same in the US. Only a few reactor designs like CANDU are capable of online refueling without interruption. Planned shutdowns for refueling are scheduled for low-demand times of the year.
Of course the CO² impact per kwh is higher in Germany. The country started two world wars and the winning factions understandably weren't overly eager to see Germany building nuclear proliferation capabilities. For the first 10 years after WW2 any kind of nuclear research was forbidden. For the same reason Germany was also forbidden to have an army in the first years after 1945. That's why nuclear never played a big role in Germany and critical parts of nuclear infrastructure (like fuel rod recycling) are still done in other countries (mostly France).
Coal mining is dangerous/destructive, burning coal is poisoning the oceans and has killed many, many people. For example, an estimate is that over 20,000 deaths are caused per year due to burning coal in Europe. I am not sure how many of these deaths Germany is exporting every year to countries downwind, but it isn't zero:
https://news.mongabay.com/2013/06/burning-coal-responsible-f...
A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009:
Of course the above is just the immediate damage from coal - future generations will have to live with the effects of all that CO2 being added to the atmosphere from Germany burning lignite and hard coal to produce ~130 TWh of power. How many deaths will come from that? (Burning natural gas produces less CO2 than burning coal, but the production and distribution of natural gas leads to enough losses to the atmosphere, it is estimated the climate impact might be similar to coal.)
Choosing to eliminate nuclear power when you are still burning fossil fuels is truly a horrible decision.
North Stream 2 anyone? Why do you think Germany needs to increase enormously its gas imports from Russia? Gas is cleaner than coal, but still much worse than nuclear. That will be a serious problem to meet net 0-emission targets in 2050 as planned.
It really really doesn’t. This is a political thing with Russia, Gazprom and our former chancellor Schröder. The aim (mostly for Russia) is to circumvent Ukraine and thereby remove their opportunity to … acquire … some of what is moved through their territory. As far as I remember Nordstream I isn’t even at capacity.
Sure from a Ukrainian point of view NSII sucks. But it isn’t even close to an existential thing for Germany. The gas dependency is temporary (<15 years) and could also be filled by US LNG. Which is why the US is against NSII
So yeah from a geopolitical point of view this is all very interesting. From an ecological point of view the net impact is close to zero
I expect Germany to actually lower their CO² emissions by switching from coal to gas in the upcoming decade. It will be a way to show that "plenty of renewable + no nuclear is the way to 0 CO² emission".
Until they reach the lower limit with all the gas plants deployed, then they'll really have to think again about how they will definitely remove those plants.
Gas is really the best backup for renewable. It's cheap (for now), really adjustable (perfect for the renewable intermittence, on the contrary of nuclear), easy to deploy (not that easy with nuclear plants). The only issue is that it still emits a lot of CO²… and that you strongly depend on other countries for your energy (gas cannot be store as easily as uranium for example).
Coal: per Wikipedia: Germany has been opening new coal power plants until recently, following a 2007 plan to build 26 new coal plants. This has been controversial in light of Germany's commitment to curbing carbon emissions.
But they changed direction - I didn't know that: On 26 January 2019, [a decision was made] to close all 84 coal plants in the country by 2038...Coal was used to generate almost 40% of the country's electricity in 2018 and is expected to be replaced by renewable energy and natural gas. 24 coal plants are planned to be closed by 2022 with all but 8 closed by 2030.
Nuclear: per Wikipedia: A coalition government of Gerhard Schroeder took the decision in 2002 to phaseout all nuclear power by 2022...Within days of the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, large anti-nuclear protests occurred in Germany...Merkel's government announced that it would close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022. Eight of the seventeen operating reactors in Germany were permanently shut down following Fukushima in 2011. German coal consumption has risen during 2011, 2012 and 2013. (but is now decreasing)
Germany nuclear is 13%, but most of that is imported from France at this point, I think. So, no coal, no nuclear, hate natural gas - depend on renewables.
Don't worry, they are planning to turn off coal completely around 2035… and replace them with natural gas plants imported from Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
Yeah, improving nothing as natural gas has similar OC2e to coal (with much smaller CO2 - but the methane makes up for it, to it comes up the same), while giving money to Europe's enemies. Perfect.
It's not like Russia has a long history of having "pipeline malfunctions" during periods of intense international disagreements. What could go wrong with Germans being firmly under the thumb of Putin or his successor?
I wouldn't say that "unsurprisingly many of [the top 10 polluting plants] are in China and India", when there is one in China (at rank 6, below a Polish plant, two South Korean plants and only slightly above the German one) and India has two. Especially when each of those countries has over one billion people, more than an order of magnitude more than Poland, Germany or South Korea.
It's unsurprising because China burns a LOT of coal and has a per capita emissions about the same as the UK, even taking into account exports vs imports (!) in spite of the much lower per capita income. China burns ~51% of the world's coal, in spite of not having even close to 51% of the world's population. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-coal-consumption-...
(I think China's coal plants tend to be smaller and so don't show up on these lists.)
If everyone else drops their emissions to zero (which needs to happen) and goes autarkic, cutting off all trade with China, assuming China maintains its stability and current energy mix, we'll still be screwed from a climate perspective.
We need everyone to reduce emissions, including China and the West both.
Your data only goes to 2016. In just 4-5 years, the UK’s per capita emissions have continued to fall (thanks to retiring coal very quickly!) while China’s has risen to above that of the OECD average for the first time: https://rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-...
Is this 5% by number of power plants or is this 5% of the generating capacity? E.g. maybe these most-polluting plants are just massive and make up 50% of energy generation?
It's 5% of power plants. These plants are massive.
The paper does state (and shows data for the top 10) indicating that the largest emitters also happen to be generally more inefficient (in terms of CO2 per power) than their national average (for fossil fuel plans).
EDIT: I just wanted to draw out the implications.
Based on paper figures, we can ballpark then that those 5% of plants produce on the order of 30-40% of fossil fuel production energy. Shutting down those 5% of plants would be relatively efficient in terms of % CO2 reduction vs energy production size needed.
That being said, since the goal long-term goal is basically 0 fossil fuels before 2050, what would be important to have policies that ensure that replacement capacity is meant with major decrease in emissions. Like, we could for example get a ~33% reduction in emissions by replacing some of these plants 1 for 1 with more efficient gas plants. But ideally we want even more draw down - that means having policies in place to ensure a significant amount of capacity is replaced with renewable sources.
That's really the challenge (and has been the challenge the entire time).
Saying that the largest coal plants are more carbon intensive than the average of coal and gas plants in the same country is such an absurdly strange stat to use that I believe this paper was funded by natural gas interests. Nothing else makes any sense to me.
For those unfamiliar, gas plants are much less carbon intensive than coal plants. It gets a bit murkier if you include methane leaks, though gas is less dirty in terms of non greenhouse pollutants but basically both should be phased out and coal should generally go first.
5% of the plants; shutting them down will not be easy. For example the one in Poland generates about 20% of Poland's electricity and was recently expanded.
Prairie State Energy Station [1] in Southern Illinois is one of these plants. Roughly 200 municipalities bought into it ~10-12 years ago with the promise of locking in cheap electricity for decades. Now, those who own shares of it (both municipalities and electric co ops [2]) are kicking and screaming that they're entitled to continue to operate the plant because it would raise electrical rates for their citizens to retire it early.
"Illinois lawmakers are still debating a statewide energy proposal that would shutter the state’s coal-fired power plants by 2035. A local utility cooperative is asking its members to lobby lawmakers to keep it open.
Illinois Electric Cooperative has issued letters to their members asking to keep the plants open because they say it will cost utility rate payers more money and provide an unreliable electric grid of power.
IEC’s general manager Randy Long says it will also saddle the state with significant outstanding debt: “We believe it is probably going to reduce grid reliability and it’s going to cause good energy jobs to leave the State of Illinois along with the tax base to neighboring states and it’s going to increase our [utility] rates also. In 2035, the Prairie State plant will still have about $188 million worth of debt, and that is still going to have to be paid off. We’ll no longer be getting energy from that plant either, so we’ll have to replace that energy from another source. We are just very concerned about that – the increased costs to our members and also the reliability on the grid, which is really in the forefront after the blackouts we have just heard about in Texas and California recently.”"
(my note: it has been proven that the blackouts in California and Texas were not caused by renewables, but by grid mismanagement; solar and wind backed by storage is also cheaper than coal, so this is clearly not about cost but maintaining the status quo)
"PSEC started delivering electricity in 2012 at prices well above market rates. Some of its investors resell the energy at a loss, some raise consumer rates, and two backed out of the project. PSEC's original $2 billion estimated cost attracted municipal electric utilities to invest and to sign 28 year contracts. However, as of early 2010 the estimated cost had increased to $4.4 billion, requiring investors to borrow more money and raising the projected cost of electricity to undesirable levels. Peabody in response capped construction costs at "approximately $4 billion" excluding some costs such as coal development and transmission lines. In January 2013, with many municipalities adversely impacted by the high prices, the SEC subpoenaed information from Peabody. In a bid to exit its share of the Prairie State project, the City of Hermann, MO filed a lawsuit in March, 2015 against the Missouri Joint Municipal Electric Utility Commission and the Missouri Public Energy Pool, claiming that its share of $1.5 billion in debt issued to support Prairie State imposed an unconstitutionally high level of debt on the city.
Peabody divested its 5.06% stake in the project in 2016, accepting $57 million for its original investment of nearly $250 million. The buyer was Wabash Valley Power Association, a Midwest cooperative."
This is where the federal government should step in and provide subsidies to help close this plant. Even though Illinois chose poorly, bygones should be bygones and the global impact too great to let a small set of individuals make this decision.
The market has a financial tool for this, called "Solar for coal" swaps, where the existing debt is refinanced into new debt (at competitive financing rates) issued for building utility scale solar generators. Agree that the US gov or the central bank should step in otherwise to subsidize the closure of these plants. It's going to happen one way or another.
Municipalities and non profit co ops will not voluntarily pursue bankruptcy to re-negotiate or default on these debts (which will also impact their credit rating in the debt market for future issuances). They'll have to be forced into it if outside support isn't provided.
Unfortunately, American politicians that claim to care about CO2 are tremendously hypocritical the minute prices come into play. They are happy to do things like halt the construction of pipelines or put a halt on new oil/gas leases on Federal land (it's just hurting a few thousand blue-collar workers, after all) while simultaneously lobbying OPEC to increase production to keep oil prices lower. (This is exactly what has happened with the Biden administration.). Even better has been the approval of the new German/Russian gas pipeline months after halting a massive pipeline in the USA. (Yes, I understand that the US pipeline was going to transmit very high carbon tar sands oil vs. the natural gas transported on the Russian pipeline)
Carbon emitted in another country isn't any better than carbon emitted in your own country, but the religious-like attitude taken by certain politicians and climate activists ignores this. They seem to believe the supposed moral superiority of pushing carbon intensive activities outside of a nation's borders is worth something.
There's something to what you said, but I also don't think a totally nihilistic perspective is justified. No Administration is going to be perfect WRT climate change, and there are real political constraints on oil prices in the near term.
What we need is to make electric vehicles (including PHEVs) like 80-100% of our vehicle mix, not ~1% for current cars on the road or 2-4% of new vehicles. Then oil prices wouldn't matter so much politically (it'll still affect industry, but that's much less impactful politically compared to motor gasoline prices).
As far as Germany approving a pipeline with Russia, well... I agree it's pretty dumb. Germany needs to just end their coal entirely, which in the very near term means more gas, but they should also try to reverse the closure of nuclear power plants.
I own a Tesla, so I'm into electric cars and doing what's necessary to minimize vehicular carbon emissions. That being said, oil is a globally fungible commodity, and the less we use here in industrialized countries, the cheaper it gets for use in developing nations. Historically, developing nations have always chosen to maximize energy consumption by using the cheapest sources available. How is this going to be mitigated? I'm not aware of any discussions on this topic, but hope they exist.
The US is actually a net exporter of oil (and oil products), gas, and coal. So if we eliminated current consumption and production in the US, it would actually increase prices slightly overseas.
But to really answer your question:
1) We invest in tech and scale up to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuel. Other countries will benefit from our scale and tech improvements, reducing the relative competitiveness of fossil fuels.
2) ban production and exports of fossil fuels. Instead, actually export clean energy in the form of ammonia/nitrate fertilizer (from green hydrogen), liquid hydrogen, perhaps synthesized LNG, synth fuels, clean electricity.
3) border adjustments and a CO2-based import tarrif.
4) cultural imperialism making clean energy good (fast electric cars are an excellent example) and fossil fuels unpalatable.
5) International agreements and treaties.
6) tied to that, maybe targeted aid contingent on climate action.
> No Administration is going to be perfect WRT climate change
The problem is that we need them to be, or we’re all going to die (of fire, pollution, flooding, food shortages, etc.)
To see what I mean, try to buy a 6” diameter PVC sewer pipe. A large percentage of global PVC is still offline due to the Texas freeze last winter. This is causing road work and repairs to ground to a halt.
At the current rate of industrial collapse, how long until water treatment and other life-critical industries go offline?
I am less optimistic. Those plants are *massive*. Shutting them down will not be easy. For example the one in Poland accounts for about 20% of the total power generation in Poland and was recently expanded[1].
Hmm, I read the paper, on page 12, showing the top 10 polluting power plants in 2018 and 2009, in 2018, the lists goes, there is only 1 from China and India, respectively, how is that translate to "The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants... unsurprisingly many of them are in China and India"
1 Belchatow Poland 37,600,000 Coal 27 5298 1.756
2 Vindhyachal India 33,877,953 Coal 14 4760 1.485
3 Dangjin South Korea 33,500,000 Coal 10 6115 1.473
Coal is deeply unpopular in most areas where good alternatives exist.
5 & 7 already are now operating at reduced capacity, as alternative power plants have come online, and over a decade or so, the plan is to reduce operational capacity and possibly decommission. I suspect if you dig into some of the rest of these, you'll find similar situations.
Sure, but how that translate to the statement that among the top 10, "many are from China and India". China is the target everyone wants to beat. But for India, India's per capita emission is so small. That means Indian people are living a far lower standard than average. And put the label on such a nation, ask them to continuously living a bad life. Isn't that malicious?
That's shockingly low given the amount I hear renewables pitched as a cure for climate change.
Not that they don't help, but if we woke up tomorrow to a completely renewable global grid, looks like we'll have barely made headway into ending climate change.
Right, so there are a bunch of other fossil fuel burning CO2 sources that get lumped into industrial, housing, transportation, and "other" categories (basically, all decentralized fossil fuel burning doesn't get lumped into the quarter I initially stated). A sufficiently capable renewable grid (or cheap enough off-grid generation and storage) could displace many of those uses.
Skimming through the page, I'd eyeball roughly 25% (from electricity and heating), 12% (~60% of 21% industrial), 10% (of the 14% from transport), 4% (from the 6% of buildings... note that this is only counting heating and onsite energy production, not life-cycle costs), and say 5% (from the 10% of other...). That works out to ~55%. Agriculture, Forestry and Land use takes a massive piece of the pie at 25% by itself. That alone makes it difficult for renewables alone to make things work.
That's why most models for net-zero include significant carbon capture projects, and why agriculture and land-use reform and conservation is so important.
> if we're going to get serious about saving ourselves
If we were serious about saving ourselves we would have started controlled scaling down of economic activity 30-40 years ago.
If we were serious about saving ourselves we would immediately start scaling down fossil fuel usage, but we currently are using more of every fossil fuel on Earth than we were 5 years ago.
As I pointed out in another comment, if we take aggressive action and make the most optimistic estimates regarding this path we'll see us reset our emissions back to 2010. Which is nice but not anywhere near enough in a short enough time span to make a difference.
If this is the "most encouraging bits of news" then we are in extreme danger.
edit: the irrational downvotes comments like this gets would crack me up if it wasn't so sad. We've tried to solve climate change through "more production" for decades now and have only see things get worse. If you disagree with me, please show me some basic estimates about how you have a solution that scales up to working.
Speaking of worst polluting power plants in the world - where I'm from(Poland), the largest power plant in the country(Bełchatów Power Plant) burns lignite for power - and I can't believe the emissions per kWh from that plant are estimated at slightly above 1kg of CO2 per kWh!!!!!
Seeing as Tesla Model 3 uses around 150Wh per kilometer travelled, if you exclusively charged it using electricity from that power plant, it would be worse than many diesel or petrol vehicles on the road currently. And that's a stupidly efficient EV, there are many which everage 300-400Wh per km travelled, you'd need to buy a petrol Range Rover to even compete in terms of CO2/km emissions with that.
There's only enough lignite around Bełchatów to last until the rest of this decade - given that it's generally uneconomical to transport the fuel over large distances, that will be the end of it.
Overall lignite use in Poland has been decreasing for years now:
> there are many which everage 300-400Wh per km travelled,
You'd be hard pressed to get such figures from an EV. The worst offender that's still a passenger car consumes 368Wh/km at highway speeds(120km/h) in cold weather (-10°C), but its economy is unusually bad. My pet theory is that it's mining BTC in the background, because those figures are outrageous.
>it's generally uneconomical to transport the fuel over large distances, that will be the end of it.
"Uneconomical" is an understatement, it's almost impossible. Bełchatów burns ~1 ton of coal per second. This means that if it were supplied by train, it would need 1 coal wagon per minute, 24/7.
Why when counting CO2 emissions for petrol cars people only count what comes out of exhaust pipe and not whole petrol industry?
Because for electric cars you counted almost complete process for petrol you missed a lot.
That's a very fair point - obviously, I was just going with official quoted CO2/km figures for comparison sake, to basically show that certain power plants are so astronomically bad, that even the most efficient EV powered by them ends up being worse than the (quoted) CO2/km figures for petrol/diesel cars. That's not a an attack on electric cars, nor a defense of ICEs - just an attack in the idioicy of burning lignite for power.
I am completely with you. IMHO, it is because of easy numbers. Here's CO2 per km and here's Wh per km.
Also people (pushed by oil lobby??) not only forget whole pipeline (pun intended) of petrol industry, but are very concerned that couple hundred kg of batteries is worse than tens of thousands of liters of petrol burned over lifetime of a vehicle.
I often drive between Chęstochowa and Łódź in winter. I have no direct proof that it's from this exact plant, but the smell and smog is horrendous there.
What amazes me the most is how far it goes. From my anecdotal experience the smell goes 50-100km in radius depending on the weather.
If weather is "right" you can smell burning coal out of Katowice, though maybe smell comes from residential buildings as well, I am not sure. Maybe a local could provide better info.
Given you talk about winter, I rather think this smell is from burning coal (...and other questionable materials) in residential buildings for heating.
I know, it's absolutely baffling to me, but I know loads of people in Poland who still have coal fired boilers for heating. When asked about this, they say that there is no natural gas pipeline anywhere near them(and local council isn't interested in putting one in), and not everyone has space for an LNG tank in their garden(or even a garden) and heating with electricy would literally make them bankrupt very quickly. So....coal is the only option that everyone can afford.
I have no point of reference to compare this to, so I looked up the average figures for the US. For anyone who wants to know, the EIA gives 0.92 lb (.42 kg) per kWh.
EV’s are a net reduction in normal usage patterns.
First extradition, manufacturing, and transporting gasoline releases significant CO2. Most power plants are actually very efficient due with many in the 60% efficiency range, because unlike ICE they don’t idle or need to be portable. On top of that a large fraction of EV electricity is coming from ultra low CO2 sources.
> Given where EVs have sold to date, their emissions—based on 2019 power plant emissions data—are equivalent to a gasoline car that gets 93 miles per gallon (mpg), which is dramatically better than even the most efficient gasoline hybrid. Last year, when we conducted the same analysis based on 2018 power plant data, EV emissions were equivalent to an 88-mpg gasoline car, so the “climate pollution gap” between gasoline and electric vehicles is continuing to widen.
Yes, but since the actual renewable energy is also sold, and that energy certainly is renewable, isn't its greenness also -- first, and arguably "mainly" -- being sold to the buyers of that actual energy? I mean, they're certainly paying for something, and since the energy they're paying for is green, they must be paying for both energy and greenness... Right?
So then selling the greenness again, in the form of these weird "certificates", must mean they're selling the greenness twice.
When I was young, shit like that used to be called fraud.
"Coal generates nearly 40% of the world's electricity, close to its highest share in decades. And there are now 80 countries using coal power, up from 66 in 2000."
Coal is 36% of global grid electricity production and falling from a peak of 41% in 2013, excluding home PV installations. Current industry projection is 22% of global grid electricity will come from coal in 2040 based on new power plant construction vs existing power plants decommissioned due to age. But even that is pessimistic as EV’s represent new demand so it’s the ratio of new plants being constructed that’s important.
All of which is largely irrelevant as average coal power plants powering EV’s still favors EV’s over gasoline powering average ICE’s. At the refinery alone almost 3lb’s of CO2 is produced per gallon of gas, distribution from refineries to gas stations again releases CO2 etc etc.
Well, "renewable energy in California" was at 52.7% in 2017, and California's 40mil people seem to own EVs at a world-high per-capita rate from my anecdata, therefore the most dense populous flock of EVs in the world is using ~52.7% renewables as their power source
Why do I get the feeling everything is too little or too late? I agree though, let's make them do better.
I live in Gary Indiana, and while we have 2 smaller power plants near us (25-50 miles ish), there's about a million steel mills, oil refineries, and a bunch of other polluters thrown in for good measure, all either on or near Lake Michigan, which is our main source of drinking water.
Can't we just target all mega polluters? I wish we could just force industry to spend a shit tonne of their profits on R&D to offset their damage, not improve their product, but improve their processes for something other than cost, efficiency, speed, and just did shit in the least destructive way possible.
I've been tracking air pollution in Gary (and also cargo ships, flights, etc) on my lil community website: https://millerbeach.community for the past two years. I'm trying to fund a proper air quality sensor/monitoring system that does more than just PM2.5/10, but until then it's just PM.
This is one of the reasons virtually all economists support a broad carbon price. If its broad, in the sense of encompassing a wide variety of economic activities, it gets all the different polluters you referred to as well as the ones that you and regulators haven't even thought of.
I agree! How can a commoner further support the idea? But, also a step further maybe?
I was in FL last week and as I was travelling home I read a story about 1000s of fish, aquatic life dead in the water, including a Manatee, apparently caused by a phosphorus plant leak's red algae bloom.
It requires a political solution. The plan which has the widest bipartisan buy-in is the Climate Leadership Council's plan for a tax and dividend approach. Its got supporters from Exxon to World Wildlife Fund.
A leak at a plant likely violates its operating permit, so I would guess that regulators are looking at it. Of course, regulations and enforcement are very weak, that is also a political problem.
Those are the big goals but the best thing a commoner can do is support or join a local environmental group. Groups like the Sierra Club have local chapters that could be interested in the air quality monitoring work you are doing. They also do things like testify at public hearings, sue polluters for local harm, advocate in policy discussions by officials and in local news and support candidates.
> Can't we just target all mega polluters? I wish we could just force industry to spend a shit tonne of their profits on R&D to offset their damage, not improve their product, but improve their processes for something other than cost, efficiency, speed, and just did shit in the least destructive way possible.
Some processes are hard to do without releasing CO2. That's why there's a focus on electricity generation since that can be done without emissions.
It's the same thing with aviation: it'll be very hard to switch to alternate fuel because of the weight and energy density required. But for cars it's "only" a matter of scaling production of EVs.
A pretty large portion of aviation (over 50% of miles traveled) is short-haul, which actually is amenable to battery-electric decarbonization. And much of the rest could be converted to a few short haul hops which can be electrified.
For aviation, a lot of it is just the inertia of the industry (which is a duopoly) and regulators and the decades it takes to get any new large passenger aircraft designed and approved, let alone one using a new kind of powertrain.
At 1000-1500km range for short haul, it’s not easy and can’t be done just by drop-in replacement with existing airframes, but with clean sheet designs, it is feasible. Especially as lithium metal electrode and lithium sulfur becomes available. In fact, it may be feasible to do up to 4000km range eventually (big challenge, but feasible given state of the art aerodynamics and improved structure and battery… and definitely possible with out of the box thinking, as a crewed solar-electric aircraft has demonstrated a flight of nearly 9000km, ie from Japan to Hawaii).
> At 1000-1500km range for short haul, it’s not easy and can’t be done just by drop-in replacement with existing airframes, but with clean sheet designs, it is feasible.
If it can be made cheaper than the California High Speed Rail, I've got a market for you right here...
Indeed. The eFlyer 800 by Bye Aerospace, 925km range (at max payload) at over 320mph cruise, would be faster than the 200mph Cali HSR project that would’ve been at most 850km in phase 1 (and that would’ve been multiple hops most likely).
Yes. The capital cost is only slightly higher for 30 eFlyer 800s vs 1 new 737, but the operating cost is much lower. eFlyers are more flexible as they can operate at small rural and suburban airports that wouldn't be economically viable with large aircraft, and this also enables much less time spent in airport terminals as smaller airports are MUCH faster to get through compared to large airports like LAX. We're talking like 15 minutes vs an hour.
A boeing 737 carries ~190 people and luggage. I don't see how that's going to be electrified. And I'm not talking in the sense of "technology isn't there yet", but more like "the laws of physics wouldn't appreciate that".
In my mind, the carbon neutra solution seems to lie in adopting renewable biofuels and engineering those jet engines to be ever more efficient, both of which seem attainable.
> I don't see how that's going to be electrified. And I'm not talking in the sense of "technology isn't there yet", but more like "the laws of physics wouldn't appreciate that".
No matter how much it's repeated, scale still doesn't matter in terms of the physics of flight and electrification. I know people find it counter-intuitive, but it really ISN'T harder from a physics perspective to electrify a 737 (although you generally want a longer wingspan than airports like, so you may choose 777x-like extending wingtips).
Pet peeve of mine that people think "oh, it's big so it's hard to electrify" (without actually doing any fundamental physics on the idea) when the largest machines are actually already electric (think
bucketwheel excavators).
In fact, in some ways, efficiency IMPROVES with scale, but it depends on a few factors (may need truss-braced wings at long enough wingspan, but that's doable). See how L/D improves with increasing Reynolds Number: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Lift-to-drag-ratio-varia...
I mean ask yourself: is a business jet much more efficient than a 737? No? Well then why would it be harder to electrify a 737, from a physics perspective? In fact, a 737 is far more efficient than most much smaller aircraft using jet technology. And a Cessna is like half as efficient (or less) in terms of L/D in spite of being slower and much smaller.
Even with the highest theoretical possibilities, batteries cannot be as energy dense as kerosene.
Kerosene has about about 12,000 Wh/kg, a cutting edge lithium battery has only 200. Scientists speculate that on paper, chemical batteries can theoretically get to about 1100 Wh/kg. A perfect world is still not even close to close to kerosene.
Batteries do not get lighter as they discharge like a fuel tank does, meaning a huge efficiency loss. Finally it's simply not physically possible to recharge a large airliner size battery as fast as a fuel tank can be refilled, and on short haul flights, turnaround matters. Some airlines go from arrival to departure in 30 minutes. Modern airliners do up to 8 flights a day!
> Even with the highest theoretical possibilities, batteries cannot be as energy dense as kerosene.
So what? We can make kerosene-fueled aircraft that can fly more than all the way around the world without refueling. In fact, we did it 15 years ago, and we left some performance on the table as it had a L/D of 37 but modern sailplanes can get over 70 L/D (and the jet engine they used wasn't particularly efficient), and with forced laminar flow control, 100 L/D is possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
Kerosene is better than it needs to be.
Cutting edge typical lithium ion chemistries (like you might find in a Tesla) has about 300Wh/kg, but pre-production lithium-sulfur batteries can get up to 650Wh/kg (lithium sulfur and lithium metal anode batteries that are available in sample quantites in actual pouch form are around 400-450Wh/kg). But also, batteries are roughly twice (sometimes 3 times) as efficient as jet engines. As you mention, chemical batteries could do 1100Wh/kg (not counting lithium-air, which could do much, much better but we're probably a couple decades to deploying them). Not getting lighter over time is a performance drag, but there are actually ways to deal with it. But let's split the difference and say batteries could be about a tenth as good as kerosene.
41,000km is the distance that Globalflyer flew. A tenth that range is 4100km, which is the minimum flight length to qualify for long-haul (and also the distance from Hawaii to California). So we could have long haul electric flight if we wanted to, without the solar-electric trick or any kind of towing, in-air charging, staging, or launch-assist.
Turnaround in 30 minutes isn't fantastically hard for battery chemistries, either, BTW. 5 minutes would be pretty hard, although still not impossible (and some chemistries can do this). And again, this is largely scale-invariant. A Tesla that can mostly charge in 30 minutes means a short-haul aircraft could as well. And you can get lithium batteries (LiPo and Lithium Titanate) that charge in 6-12 minutes or so (5-10C rate). This is faster than most jets get refueled (it takes 45 minutes to an hour for larger jets, so I don't see charging time to be a huge challenge).
Global flyer weighed 1500kg and topped out at half the speed of an airliner's cruising speed. A 737 weighs over 40,000kg empty and tens of thousands more when you add in passengers and their luggage. Yes, electric flight is possible, but it simply cannot replace the modern airliner.
Right, to be similar efficiency as Globalflyer without improvements to aerodynamics (which is possible), you’d need to restrict flight speeds to roughly Mach 0.5 like passenger commercial turboprop aircraft (instead of 0.7-0.8 for commercial jets). A turboprop Dash-8 (although aging) with up to 90 passenger seats (~same as the original 737) is relatively competitive for short haul, so I wouldn’t consider that lower speed to be a showstopper. Dash-8 is, after all, a commercial airliner in common use.
But the SCALE of the aircraft is basically irrelevant when discussing fundamental figures of merit like mass-specific energy. In spite of repeating your concern several times, I’m not sure what you think scale has to do with figures of merit that are explicitly scale-less (Wh/kg).
thank you for your community service tracking air pollution in Gary, Indiana!
that data you gather could be presented politically, socially, legally. By preparing a modern data environment with summary and random access, you are doing a LOT of prep ! it is needed now. best from California
I actually have good reason to fight pollution too, my 8 month old daughter passed away from her battle with heart disease and a very rare genetic condition called Kabuki syndrome a few months ago. Pollution is linked to both congenital heart disease, genetic conditions, and more. My wife and I are not carriers. Her specific conditions were very rare, the odds of all were 1 in 700 million to 1 in 2 billion+. The year prior, Ben Watkins, a teen who lived a few blocks from me, died from an extremely rare cancer that only a few people in the world have/get. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/18/us/ben-watkins-masterchef/ind...
Good question! Most companies I've reached out to have products in the range of $3,000-$10,000 for the initial cost, and then a reoccurring/annual fee of around $500-2500 (depending on what sensors are included)
I reached out to a few, the two I'd heard back from, AQMesh and EarthSense, both gave me a rough quotes.
I cheekily asked if they had a community program (at a reduced cost), but understandable they don't, as their products are highly scientific lil things, both asked me to reach out to my local government, but most people who know of Gary, know it has no funds (or interest) in tracking air quality any more than they already do.
I am in the process of starting a charity on behalf of my daughter, Sterling. We spent 7 months in the ICU, until she passed away at 8 months from complications relating to her complex heart disease. https://sterlingstrong.foundation
I've been considering if renting/purchasing a complete air quality monitoring station would be a good thing to launch along with my daughter's charity. The way I see it, if I can't help solve the issue, I can at least bring further attention/awareness to it.
One thing I realized recently is that we have "coal power plants" that produce zero electricity: coal seam fires. This gets very little attention given the importance. I think it's low-hanging fruit for climate mitigations. On the order of 1 Gigatonne of CO2 per year is emitted from coal seam fires, versus ~14 Gigatonnes of CO2 from coal as useful fuel globally.
It shouldn't proportionally cost a whole lot to stop these coal seam fires (which are mostly human caused, although ALL contribute to climate change), and they are really terrible for other reasons as well (safety, local air pollution, literally wasting fossil resources, etc). The issue deserves more attention. It's incredibly low hanging fruit.
We need more analyses like that. As an ex-consultant I always amazed by how people try to optimize the smallest blocks. The Pareto principle is universally applicable. Let's tackle the biggest carbon blocks first.
Excellent point. As I've commented elsewhere, there is a Puritanical, moralistic urge in many climate activists that focuses on as many individuals as possible changing their consumption habits for small gains over targeting the super-polluters like these power plants or the individual cargo ships which emit more CO2 than entire cities.
My father is one of these. He used to be a religious fundamentalist in the 80's, and over time has replaced his need to be a part of a religion that polices people's sexual/linguistic habits with being a part of an ideology that polices people's consumption/linguistic habits instead. It clearly fills the same void. Whenever I mention things like this to him, it clearly bothers him that we can help the climate WITHOUT calling on individuals to sacrifice the way he already does.
nope... If you improve the efficiency of coal plants say by 25%, then you have a choice : either you keep those 25% as CO2 that's not produced anymore in the future, either you say that for the same amount of CO2 you can have 25% more appliances.
In the first case, it means that the 25% kept for the future shall not be used : you cap consumption to 25% less than what it is today (great, but many people unhappy because you stop producing more electricty).
In the second case, you accept to use those 25% but then you stay at today's CO2 production level, which is known to be too high.
Whatever scenario, you'll have (you, me and other individuals) to use less electricity.
I don't think that reducing CO2 emissions from a given electrical plant should be assumed to be something that made the plant more efficient and the electricity it produces to be cheaper, and therefore resulting in a proportionate increase in consumption.
I attribute it to the desire to do something, and at the same a perception that an individual cannot affect the big fish. The only option left becomes individual action. Logically, people in this state will see indiviual action as a virtue in others regardless of their Puritanical views.
Just by reading the abstract this seems a bit strange.
Ok, they identify some of the worst CO2 emitters and propose to start tackling those. But then their proposal is that these "lowered their emission intensities, switched to gas fuels, and incorporated carbon capture and storage systems."
Like they propose three things that still depend on fossil fuels, from which one is vague, one is something that hasn't worked anywhere although it's been proposed as a solution for more than a decade (CCS) and one that at best provides minor emisison reductions if looking at full lifecycle emissions (gas).
One ways to do this is by reducing the “Imbalance Settlement Period”.
Scandinavia and UK is changing from 60 to 15minutes. Scandinavia within summer/Q3 2022.
Because the power plants using heat (coal and nuclear) is so slow to adapt, they have a disadvantage when the energy price is fluctuating.
Before this is possible you have to change the electricity meters to support lower than 60minutes, or stipulate the energy (money incentive to change meter). This require a national coordination before the change take place. Norway was finished in 2019, Sweden is on their way.
This focus on CO₂ as a "pollutant" saddens me, since it's by far not the worst substance emitted by power plants. Can we ever go back to a sensible environmentalism that considers all harmful effects on the planet and its inhabitants?
These power plants are also responsible for most of the local NO2 in the air. NO2, on the other hand, can be measured well with satellites. This calls for a performance indicator as proof-of-decarbonization.
These are the kind of places to put effort into eliminating/ changing. Its can be managed from a more 'top-down' regulatory mechanism. It represents a significant chunk of the emissions. It doesn't require individual buy-in (not to the extent promoting vegetarianism would). People effected would/ could see no appreciable difference in their quality of life (maybe a slight uptick in power costs, but even that could be mitigated/ subsidized).
These are the right kinds of solutions to focus our efforts on for reducing carbon consumption.
It is easier said than done. While the discourse in the media is often skewed towards accusing the West, the elephant in the room is China with its 30% of global CO2 emissions.[0] Discussions with China aren't particularly easy, especially if you start from the position "you must stop doing what we've been doing for a couple of decades."
China has great electric public transportation and are more aggressive than USA in adopting EVs. I don't think it'll be long before USA is left behind in terms of transforming their economy
I'm fairly sure this is the exact strategy used by basically everyone, yet everyone in this thread seems to think this is some new innovation and those damn hippies are finally doing something sensible.
Obama's Clean Power plan for example, just says "we want you to come up with a plan to reduce Carbon, do whatever is easiest for you".
Paris agreement, basically the same.
Carbon prices, fees, taxes or caps? Same thing.
Possibly this is even less sensible than those approaches as it seems to be talking about "powerplants" which naturally biases against large, efficient plants.
If you had 10 small but inefficient coal plants it may make sense to shut them all and use one highly efficient plant.
I believe the coal plants in China are generally of the super-critical variety and so much better in terms of carbon per MWh than your average American plant.
In fact the more I think of it the more this stat seems custom designed to make China the bad guy for some reason.
The focus on moving to gas and carbon capture in the abstract is also ringing alarm bells for me.
Yep, I assumed they couldn't be so stupid because they were being vague about it but they specifically target powerplants rather than carbon intensity:
> Figure 1 displays the locations of the world’s operative fossil-fueled power plants, their
primary fuels, and the tons of carbon dioxide they released in 2018. Some past studies have
defined super polluting power plants using intensity metrics (pollutants per unit of output or
capacity) (e.g., Tong et al. 2018a).
Further, their explanation of why they do this makes absolutely no sense:
> Although this provides a straightforward way to compare the
performance of operators of different sizes, we focus instead on total emissions because to
contain global warming there must be severe cuts in emission levels
So to be clear they have applied machine learning to someone else's database of powerplants and instead of recommending to close the ones that pollute most per KWh, that are nearing the end of their life, that would need expensive upgrades, that can easily be replaced by renewables, the ones that the local population don't like, the most expensive to run or any other sensible approach for getting the most bang per buck, they have concluded _Close the ones that are biggest and are run the most as they produce more carbon than old inefficient plants that only run occasionally_
I don't know if it possible to be that stupid without malicious intent, even by the standards of sociologists funded by the US Government.
They seem to make some attempt to argue that it's easier to demonize a single big plant as a "bad guy", but surely that's a bad idea even if it actually worked in principle?
There's simply no way we'll make a meaningful dent in GHG levels without targeting the top 1% of producers like this type of analysis suggests doing.
> I believe the coal plants in China are generally of the super-critical variety and so much better in terms of carbon per MWh than your average American plant.
Doesn't matter how efficient those Chinese plants are if they're still dumping out CO2 while we're actively trying to sequester it.
> They seem to make some attempt to argue that it's easier to demonize a single big plant as a "bad guy", but surely that's a bad idea even if it actually worked in principle?
Yes, huge win! As we clean up the electric grids we as consumers also have to transition all our fossil-fuel things (cars, furnaces, driers, etc) to electric things (electric cars, heat pumps).
Around 42% of energy-related carbon emissions are from decisions we make about the few big appliances in our homes that we replace every 10-15 years.
This is great. I would love to see this kind of reporting in the mainstream media. It is so frustrating to see media reports about climate change and "what you can do". This sort of thing puts zero responsibility in the hands of individuals and highlights the real culprits.
Why did they not release their collected raw data, R code, and the table of predicted data? Would be so much more useful if we could all quickly glance at where our local power plants rank on the scale.
Thank you for your email and interest in our research. The larger dataset that we plan to make publicly available is not yet fully assembled. Feel free to check back in the future about its availability.
Let's look at some optimistic back of the envelop estimates:
> We also find that 17% to 49% of the world's CO2 emissions from electricity generation
Let's go with a whole 50% reduction. It's important to recognize that electricity generation is only 25% of US energy GHG emissions (and less globally but it's hard to find a source so let's stick with that)[0]
We're then looking at 12.5% reduction in global emissions if these plans where implemented. If you assume that there's a pretty strong correlation between energy production and emissions (there is because renewables don't account for much global energy production), then that is roughly equivalent of rewinding our emissions to ... 2010 [1]
Add in that energy consumption globally continues to rise, and it would take a least a few years to complete these projects, even a massive effort like this doesn't amount to all that much of a difference. Even waving magic wand and completely replacing our grid power to 0 emissions sources would only push us back to 2003.
The only viable pathway to radically reducing GHG emissions is to aggressively descale our economies (we can see emissions drop in 2008 and 2020), but since no one will even remotely consider that at this point we've chosen our path.
Targeting the worst CO2/kWh power plants makes a pretty big difference because our best chance at decarbonizing most of the rest of that 75% of global emissions is to electrify them. (Biofuels, etc, are not better than electrification.)
That's a nice idea, but can you do some similar back of the envelope estimation for how much we'd have to grow the renewable/low-emissions energy grid to meet those other demands?
For example we'll need hydrogen fuel cells for any serious replacement of current oil since light trucks and beyond cannot run on lithium batteries (batteries become the cargo). But 95% of hydrogen production is currently based on fossil fuels[0]. So to come anywhere close to meeting the transport needs we would have to not only radically ramp up hydrogen production, but would need to even more extremely ramp up electrolysis.
I'd really like an insight into how we're going to achieve carbon free concrete production as well...
It's insane that HN downvotes aggressively any basic math of how dire the situation is, and always responds with hand wavy solutions that won't hold up to even the most basic back of the envelope estimates.
We’ll need to add carbon capture to the mix. Many promising atmospheric carbon capture technologies exist in the $17-70 per ton range.
A gallon of gasoline emits 20 pounds of CO2, which is conveniently 1% of a ton. So, if we added a $1/gallon gas tax, and spent 100% of the proceeds on carbon capture, the vehicle fleet would be strongly carbon negative in 5-10 years (when some
of the carbon capture technologies successfully ramped).
We could add a similar tax to concrete, electricity production, etc. The trick is to make it proportional to actual carbon emissions so that incentives align.
Once gross emissions fall off significantly, the tax would have to be increased, and/or levied against carbon neutral industries, since we’ve already completely screwed over future generations.
> Many promising atmospheric carbon capture technologies exist
Do we have any at that scale? I mean self-driving cars were a promising technology a decade ago and that's a much easier problem to solve than large scale ccs and we still might never see that.
It’s blatantly false that light trucks and up can’t use lithium ion batteries. In fact, the business case is actually better than for electric commuter cars due to the much greater efficiency. Longer range trucks are a bit of a challenge due to total weight, but doable. (And battery electric freight trains make WAY more sense than hydrogen freight trains and are actually super easy to electrify due to ability to just use overhead lines for charging and the greater efficiency of rail.)
Also, hydrogen fuel cell trucks (and cars) are worse (compared to battery) than you might think. (On the car side, the Model 3LR has more range, costs less to buy, costs far less to fuel, has a huge fast charging network, can be charged anywhere with an outlet, is much faster and actually weighs less than the hydrogen Mirai.) Hydrogen fuel cell trucks require a huge heat exchanger (with a fan), really heavy and bulky compressed hydrogen tanks, and the cost of motor hydrogen (ie distributed for dispensing to vehicles) is much, MUCH greater than that of electricity and the conversion efficiency is lower than batteries plus the fuel cells themselves have a limited lifetime and aren’t cheap, plus you need a lithium ion battery anyway and the cost of the dispensing stations is very large (even adjusted for fueling speed) due to need to cryogenically cool hydrogen before dispensing, the presence of big compressors, safety mitigations, etc.
Electric trucks are pretty straightforward compared to fuel cell hydrogen trucks.
You’re right that hydrogen production is generally from steam reforming of fossil fuels nowadays, but until the 1940s when steam reforming became available on an industrial scale, electrolysis was actually the most common industrial hydrogen source using (for instance) abundant hydroelectric power. This was used for making ammonia fertilizer, etc. (New iron plants in the US actually use a syngas mix of hydrogen and CO, although the mix can be adjusted to virtually all hydrogen without too much trouble.) So we absolutely CAN produce hydrogen using electricity, and there’s a long history of doing so, although battery electric vehicles are far more efficient than hydrogen vehicles. That, combined with heat pumps, should enable us to limit the amount of more electricity we’ll need.
Our current electricity usage in the US is ~475GW average, and by efficient decarbonization of almost all energy usage, I calculate we’d need about 1000GW total average electricity, so just a bit more than double we have now… although about 40% of current electrical energy production in the US is already decarbonized, about half of it nuclear, so we already have a leg up). that means we need ~715 GW average of more clean electricity than we have now. The US produces over 5 billion bushels of corn per year for ethanol. At 170 bushels per acre yield, that’s about 30 million acres. At typical solar farm output of about 40000 Watts average per acre (ie multiplying nameplate times capacity factor divided by footprint), that’s 1200GW average, so even if all we did was use the existing footprint of biofuels and converted it to solar, we’d have more than enough clean electricity to decarbonize everything. (Not even counting biodiesel, etc.)
So again, you claim that “won’t hold up to back of the envelope estimates” isn’t true. If you like, we can discuss this one on one and I’ll explain the calculations.
You didn't do any back of the envelope estimate. "so just about double we have now" would require what?
Let's look at this chart of US electricity production. [0]
It took us about 30 years to double our electricity generation in the US from 1975 to 2005, but since then it has largely remain flat. So how quickly do you estimate that can happen?
Then you have to look at renewable production separately since that's what you have to scale. What rate of renewable production is that going to take?
From the 50s to the 70s, we doubled our electricity about once per decade, so it’s not even greater than historical capabilities to do it in one or two decades.
As I showed above (sorry, I edited the post after you commented…), we’d need less land for solar than we currently use just for ethanol (which we don’t need).
The calculations take longer than just a quick HN post, but it’s not hard if you just add up steel, fertilizer, plastics, gasoline (only takes about 10kWh of electricity to displace a gallon of gasoline), diesel, heating with 3COP heat pumps (higher is feasible, and northern climates should use ground source), etc.
I think this may be one of the most encouraging bits of news about AGW that I've seen in a long time. 5% of electric power plants (about 1500 plants) is a lot, but it's a manageable lot. This gives us a clearly defined area of attack with a very high ROI. It seems to say: if we're going to get serious about saving ourselves, start here and go all in. The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants... unsurprisingly many of them are in China and India, but at least one is in Germany. If Germany wants to set an example, there's where to start.