Supersize Part 1:
Connecting the CO2
dots,
Discovering supersized coal burning power plants.
Supersized coal burning power plants are the low hanging fruit.
Connecting the CO
2 dots, finding Supersized power plants.
"At NRG Energy’s coal-fired electricity plant in Thompsons, Texas, a train from the Powder River Basin coal mines of Wyoming pulls in after a five-day trip from Wyoming, loaded with more than 16,000 tons of coal. It takes eight hours to unload the 130-car train, and then the next train pulls in.
This plant burns 35,000 tons of coal on a hot day to provide electricity to cool area homes. And bulldozers must constantly shift the coal stockpiled in a giant mound under the hot, noonday sun to prevent spontaneous combustion as it awaits its turn in the 2,200°F furnace. Yet burning the coal to make electricity, transporting it 1,500 miles to the power plant and keeping it cool emits enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.
The US government estimates CO2 emissions from coal-fired electricity generation comprise nearly 80 per cent of total CO2 emissions produced by the generation of electricity in the US. Sixty to 80 per cent of coal is, in fact, carbon, making it an extremely carbon-intense fossil fuel. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated the average US coal plant emits 5 million tons of CO2 each year. And there are 600 coal-fired electricity plants across the country."
Where you can find out about the world's power plants and the Global Warming they make.
http://www.platts.com/Products.aspx?xmlFile=worldelectricpowerplantsdatabase.xml
Data from CARMA (
www.CARMA.org )
The web site, CARMA, offers an
on-line a database providing Global Warming emissions information about the world's power plants.
The Excel plot of the world's largest 32,000 power plants [Excel can only plot 32,000 data entries at a time] is at right with the red line being power plants sorted by annual CO2 emissions. The author expected a normal CO2 emission distribution - values clustered toward the black line instead of the red line being crammed against the x and y axes.
Instead, the the world's power plant population (plot right) is an extreme example of the Pareto statistical principle (Teaching example: 20% of the population own 80% of the land.) (More:) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
This is extreme beyond even normal distributions that include a few giants. In oil, for example, out of the world's 500 major oil fields, the top 20 fields (4%) produce only 25% of the world's total.
Of these power plants,
The CARMA database
Looking at CARMA's data in more detail we find that only about half of the 150,000 generating units are emitting carbon dioxide. The other half are small hydro and wind generators which tend to be small, 1 megaWatt or so, and produce no Global Warming CO2, while a few of the CO2 emitters tend to be extremely large coal burners, some as large as 750 megaWatts. In fact, just the world's 50 largest power plants make almost 10% of coal's Global Warming CO2.
Knowing that the IPCC AR4 report attributed 11.7 billion short tons of CO2 to coal, and that CARMA attributed 11.4 billion short tons of CO2 to the world's 60,000 power plants, (most fossil fuel power plants burn coal), a check was made on how many power plants contributed 75% (8.6 billion short tons) of coal's 11.4 billion short tons of CO2.
That surprisingly small number was close to 1,200 or just 2% of the world's entire 65,000 power plant population. About half of the power plant population are tiny diesels or zero CO2 emitting hydro or wind farms - insignificant or zero CO2 sources.
Since IPCC AR4 states that 2007
Global Warming CO2 was 13.2 billion short tons, t
The world began to move toward a Global Warming-free future when the world began to build supersized nuclear electricity power plants. Tragically, anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations such as Sierra Club persuaded the world to build supersized coal-burning power plants instead. Supersized coal-burning power plants, now producing 3/4 of coal's CO2 in our air, led to much greater production of Global Warming CO2 than was necessary, exacerbating the Climate Change emergency now overwhelming us.
Just as these power plants supersized Global Warming, repowering them
with next-generation nuclear boilers will supersize our impact on Global
Warming.
16 Times Larger: Describing the 1,200 Supersize Power Plants by their CO
2 Emissions.
