Posts Tagged ‘emissions’

CARMA – Which power plant is doing what to our climate?

February 1st, 2009

I was looking for information on the Australian electricity markets when I stumbled upon www.carma.org . This website will provide you with very useful data on how much electricity is generated and how much carbon is emitted for over 50,000 power plants across the world. It also comes handy that you can download the data in a .csv format and then manipulate it in Excel or other spreadsheet software that you might like.

CARMA, which stands for carbon monitoring for action, is the product of the efforts of the Washington DC based think tank Centre for Global Development. A very good effort indeed.

However the blog post would not be complete without pointing out some shortcomings of the data, and suggestions on how to improve it. The most striking piece of data that is missing is the type of power plant. While you could sometimes guess from the name of the power plant or the company running it, it is not always easy to say and it is difficult to manipulate the data using this criteria.

Another important aspect to point out is that some of this data is estimated based on models. To quote their website

“For non-reporting plants, CARMA estimates emissions using a statistical model that has been fitted to data for thousands of reporting plants in the U.S., Canada, the EU, and India. The model utilizes detailed data on plant-level engineering and fuel specifications.”

Does this not mean that they do have the data on what type of plant it is and which fuel it uses, not to mention the detailed data on plant-level engineering? It would be nice if we can also see this data. The more data the better as long as we can easily process it. We should also take the estimated data with a pinch of salt. There is an underlying assumption here that all power plants in the world are the same and operated in the same manners. The model has already decided that US, Canada, EU and India are representative of the whole world. Using the data to try and find abnormalities in a non-reporting country is therefore futile as the data has been estimated assuming normality. We would go in circles.

Overall the data comes in very handy and is potentially very useful, however it would be nice to see less modelling and more hard data. The efforts that went into this must have been enormous, and they are appreciated.

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Electric cars are not inherently clean.

January 17th, 2009

I had a particularly long underground journey today. This meant that I read one of those free newspapers until I couldn’t find a word left to read, so I solved a Sudoku puzzle. Good thing I had my pen with me. There was a small news bit that said that the conservative party (UK) was taking advantage of how bad labour looks like with respect to the environment by promising to get people to switch to electric cars if they win the elections. My question is how is that supposed to help the environment?

When it comes to cars two words make them sound really clean, electric and hydrogen. In both cases it is not necessarily true. Electric cars are clean on the spot, because they have no direct emissions. The electricity in them however was not. To produce this electricity some power plant must have generated some pollution, unless of course it was a renewable. If it was a coal power plant then we are better off leaving cars to burn their fuel.

The same thing applies for hydrogen. How you produce your hydrogen is really the key factor in determining how clean it is. Is it solar hydrogen, nice! Is it hydrogen produced through electrolysis where the current was supplied by a coal power plant, not nice! Simple.

So the next time someone promises you an electric or hydrogen fuelled car, please ask them where they intend to generate those from.

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Wait! Don’t paint that plane.

January 6th, 2009

We’ve all seen planes (if you haven’t click here) and some of us flew on them. You stand at the gate looking in admiration at the beautiful machine. Fascinated by the curves on its body and the shear size of its engines, or maybe that’s only me. But I am sure that most of us have noticed that airplanes tend to be nicely painted with the airline colours. It makes it look good, acts as marketing material and adds to the flight experience.

But there is also a technical reason why airlines paint planes, and that’s to protect the body from corrosion. As the paint fades away though, planes get repainted. And then repainted and then repainted. And after some time, believe it or not, all this paint has added weight on the plane. A Boeing 747 for example when fully painted adds 250Kg of paint (see here). So paint it only twice and you have half a ton extra on the plane. If you remove 500Kg off a 747 you can reduce carbon emissions by 0.2% OK it’s not much, but it doesn’t take much effort not to paint a plane.

Or does it? In order to protect the plane against corrosion once the paint is gone, we must polish it. If we polish our 747 and put some airline logos on it we end up with only 25 Kg of paint on it, so quite a good saving.

Now think about those airlines which charge you a lot of money for that extra kilogram you have in your bag. Every extra kilogram burns some extra fuel and that costs a lot of money. And since the major cost for airlines is fuel, it pays to take 250Kg off your plane. So if I was a CEO of an airline, you would hear me shouting “Wait! Don’t paint that plane.”

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DESERTEC – A concept for the future

December 28th, 2008

Desertec (http://www.desertec.org/) is a very interesting and simple concept. It can play a large part in the future of energy and can provide a solution for today’s problems.

The idea is simple, take the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Put renewable power plants in all of them, each depending on what resource they have, and connect them all together with high voltage DC transmission lines.

The Middle East and north Africa have a lot of desert, and deserts have a lot of sun, and the sun has a lot of energy. Now let’s put many of those solar thermal power plants (Wikipedia) in the dessert and we are generating a lot of electricity out of the desert. Land that’s barely used and I doubt anyone would be missing it. The land area available is also massive and taking Egypt as an example, we can find 300 Watts per square metre coming out of the sky, and there is rarely a cloud to be seen.

So what about Europe? The western coast of Europe has substantial wind power. A country like the UK is the windiest in Europe. Spain also has substantial solar capabilities. There are some geothermal sources scattered across Europe as well.

So now we have the deserts with their solar power, the western european coast with wind and geothermal scattered all over. Connect all those together and you have a super grid of renewables. So what’s the point of connecting them all together and sending the electricity over thousands of kilometers?

Well, renewables are intermittent, the sun is not always as powerful and the wind is not always as strong. So if we connect all those renewables there is a chance that when the wind is not as strong as we want it to be in Europe, the sun will be a bit more powerful in the Middle East. And the more sources we connect the better chance we have of meeting our collective needs for electricity.

Another reason is that while most of the electricity is expected to be generated in the deserts, most of the consumption will not be there. Europe, being far more developed than North Africa, means that they will require more electricity. However North Africa would have an abundance of electricity that it will be willing to sell to Europe.

So now this seems to be working well for everyone on many different levels. The whole world will emitt less pollutants as we use more renewables. Europe will then be on its way to achieve the targets it has set itself as well as the kyoto targets it needs to acheieve in emissions. North Africa and the Middle East will be making money out of the deserts and will have clean electricity to fuel their development. Energy securty will be highly improved as we add more sources and connect them all together. Europe will be importing its electricity from many more sources than today and shouldn’t be as worried about political instability.

So overall, it seems like a good idea. What do you think?

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