To be fair, Europe looks a bit disappointing. After years (decades?) of talking about global warming there is still so much electricity coming from coal.
It is a bit telling and depressing that while many countries in EU now have a marked date where cars with internal combustion engines will be phased out and made illegal, there are no counties that have yet to set a date where they will do the same to power plants. Even in countries where the green party is part of the government (like Sweden), they see fossil fueled power plants as a critical part of their future strategy for the energy grid.
The picture of Europe is unlikely to change much. The predictions I hear is of an increase in construction of both renewables and fossil fueled power plants, and a more unstable price curve depending on weather. A lot of brown-orange that occasionally turn green when the wind is strong and quite dark when it isn't. In theory this should produce the cheapest energy, through I can't say that has been my experience so far. Relying on more energy trading depending on where energy is being produced at the moment seem to also increase transport costs, which for the end user here can be around 50% of the total price.
When is it expected for China to show up? At the Paris Climate Agreement, China stated that it will ratify 20.09% of greenhouse gases. It's sort of hard to tell where progress is when you don't have a good baseline. That goes for the USA as well. These percentages are mere numbers without good data.
Hello,
Olivier here, author of the map and founder of the company behind it. We're working on adding more countries on the map. Check again in a few months and hopefully we'll have more of them!
As a French, I'm really proud of my country. I don't know if everyone in the world could use nuclear power, but it seems to be worth the price, at least to reduce CO2 production.
Looking at the map, Quebec is doing something amazing.
Considering they have extra capacity, it's just sad to see less performing neighbors refusing to buy clean power from them for political reasons. [0] [1]
It only looks amazing because they have never investigated whether or not their hydro power produces emissions.
Based on studies where they've flooded areas without removing trees, hydro plants could be producing more GHGs than even the dirtiest coal plants. Quebec and BC could actually be the dirtiest provinces and we just don't know.
Long story short, when trees decompose in an anaerobic environment, it produces methane instead of CO2, and also takes 4 times longer to decompose.
That'd be a once off though. The dam may exist for such a long timescale that those decomposing trees under the waterline are irrelevant.
I always feel we need to simplify the carbon emissions to the point of "Carbon that was buried and is now in the atmosphere".
This generally removes life in the carbon equation and reasonably so. The carbon in life was in the air relatively recently. Trees absorbed it from the air and other organisms will eat it and re-release it. In general that alone won't revert the earth to the state it was in billions of years ago.
The carbon underground however hasn't been in the atmosphere for billions of years. That's the carbon that's going to return earth to the state it was in billions of years ago. That's what we should focus on.
> hydro plants could be producing more GHGs than even the dirtiest coal plants. Quebec and BC could actually be the dirtiest provinces and we just don't know.
> Long story short, when trees decompose in an anaerobic environment, it produces methane instead of CO2, and also takes 4 times longer to decompose.
Assuming that's true, the GHGs for all the existing dams have been emitted already... making them 0 emissions now and for the rest of their lifetime. And now, if the methane hypothesis is true, this means there are now ways to mitigate that for future dams.
There are ways to mitigate it for future dams.
No, they aren't all emitted, it takes decades for trees to break down in an aerobic environment. Anaerobic is 4 times longer. Most trees in the BC/Quebec areas that were flooded take at minimum 40 years to decay in an aerobic environment.
Key phrase:
In 1990 (13 years after filling), the Curuá-Una Dam emitted 3.6 times more greenhouse gases than would have been emitted by generating the same amount of electricity from oil.
I don’t think it was that common to flood reservoirs without removing valuable timber first. No matter how long it takes there was a fixed volume of trees that got flooded one time - you are suggesting that those trees underwater produce more warming gases than the dirtiest coal plants, MW per MW? A coal plant continuously burning enough coal to get 1000 MWe produces the same amount of warming as a hydro reservoir flooded once that has a dam that produces 1000 MWe?
There's a cottage industry using remote operated submersibles to extract timber from reservoirs.
The decision about what to do with it before flooding the reservoir would depend on things like the timber market at the time and the reason for the dam (many are flood controls that also produce electricity).
The reservoirs in BC and Quebec that were flooded were not logged.
They're also the largest in NA.
Williston Lake is 7th largest in the World.
Manicouagan Reservoir is the 5th largest in the World.
>you are suggesting that those trees underwater produce more warming gases than the dirtiest coal plants, MW per MW? A coal plant continuously burning enough coal to get 1000 MWe produces the same amount of warming as a hydro reservoir flooded once that has a dam that produces 1000 MWe?
That's exactly what the research is saying yes.
You're talking about 700 sq miles of forest here that was flooded. Not a few trees.
They usually are, Québec is borderline hated in Canada for various legitimate and illegitimate reasons and unfortunately that usually makes it hard for people to have an opinion on hydro-québec that is not rooted in their own biases.
In that case I am sorry I discounted your post, do you happen to have some links I could read? I know mercury can contaminate the reservoir's water and that it has been an issue for some northern communities, but I never heard of the methane thing.
I'm happy to be completely wrong on this, but I don't see why it would be true for a dam in Brazil vs. a dam in Canada.
BC Government has never studied it.
There's absolutely zero incentive for either province to do the research on it.
This source [0] shows 34 tonnes of CO2 per GWh from hydro and specifically mentions the releases from reservoirs and 820 tonnes per GWh from coal.
The springer link unfortunately doesn’t have any numbers for tonnes to compare but mentioned lush Amazon rainforest being flooded and the vegetation at the bottom producing the most methane which is 25x more potent ghg than CO2, resulting in 3.6x equivalent warming than due to burning coal which primarily results in CO2.
I feel like I'm doing myself a disservice here even responding to you, but pointing out that Hydro is contributing massively to released GHGs isn't lobbying for oil and gas. It's saying that people need to get their head out of the sand if they actually want to positively impact the environment. There are clean energy generating technologies, hydro can be one if done right, in BC and Quebec it wasn't.
That being said, Hydro has a lot of negative externalities even without creating an GHGs, it has poisoned whole ecosystems with mercury for instance, and then there's the impacts on salmon migration.
I'm really curious if it's possible to quickly produce small, safe nuclear reactor in high quantity, it might be a good solution to quickly remove coal as an energy source.
I'm pretty sure it's far better to mine a lot of Uranium that to use coal.
I don't know how quick it would be, but multiple navies around the world construct nuclear powered ships and submarines ( US, UK, France, Russia), usually in the "years", not "tens of years" timeframe ( unless it's an entirely new design of ship).
For instance, the French Barracuda class submarines have 150MW reactors, and while the first two boats took 10+ years to build, the next are expected within 7-9 years. And that's for the whole complex submarine, i highly doubt the reactor takes all that time, but i might be mistaken. And that's for a small 6 ship class, i imagine that doing "mass production" of said reactors could be more cost and time effective.
many coal plants are peaker plants (at least in US ~250:1000), and I don't think nuclear can replace those as they produce a continual supply of electricity. Unless these small nuclear reactors operate differently?
It takes about a decade for a new tree to start capturing much carbon, and then you have to maintain a forest for 100 years and prevent it from burning, etc. Seems like something we should do more of, but surely not a complete solution to the problem.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-the-worlds-nuclear-power-...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants