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Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world’s hyper-polluting power plants
- vitaflo 5y ago“emissions from electricity generation” to be more clear.
- vimy 5y agoHN doesn’t allow such long titles.
- thatswrong0 5y agoCould be changed to 19%
- thatswrong0 5y agoWas also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27954938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27954938
- drannex 5y agoTitle should be changed to "Top 5% of Power Plants Account for 73% of Global Electrical Emissions" that way it stays under the character limit and is more truthful.
- stanislavb 5y agoStill, it's a very good point to make. We can have a huge impact globally and quickly by focussing on 5% of the plants.
- stanislavb 5y agoA good start would be phasing out the top polluters ASAP. The top ten most polluting plants were in Poland, India, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, and Japan. South Korea has three coal-fired power plants among the top ten super polluters. India has two, and the other countries mentioned above have one each.
- sharken 5y agoThanks for collecting a list of countries, makes it so much easier to figure out where the problems are. It could be the UN leading the way on this, with a budget and a mandate to have these plants shut down or modified. The timeframe must be ambitious, as the world really doesn't have the time for long schedules. China and Taiwan seem to be the hardest to reason with, so additional pressure might be needed. But it looks promising if these plants can really be changed or phased out.
- aero-glide2 5y agoI'm from India, we could have easily replaced those coal power plants by nuclear. Sadly too many protests from environmentalists.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI'm not sure it would be easy to replace them. We are building nuclear in the UK and it is far from easy. Neither is it particularly affordable.
- neuronic 5y agoNuclear should have been built and improved 30 years ago. By the time new nuclear plants bring about their benefits, we have passed the 2,5 degrees celsius warming limit.
- imtringued 5y agoThat's actually how you got into this mess. Lots of nuclear power plants were built so long ago that all the people involved have retired. How is the next generation of nuclear power supposed to avoid that problem if people build everything at once and then stop again for 50 years?
- neuronic 5y agoNuclear fission is not the optimal solution to the energy Problem anymore. 30-40 years ago, it would have been. Time of construction and cost of these plants far outweigh its benefits when compared to easier and cheaper alternatives in the renewable sector.
- pkdpic_y9k 5y agoThats an excellent point. The subtext there is borderline positive. Or at least borderline actionable. Anyway Im reading the Ministry for the Future and its August so I need to either kill myself or join the Children of Kali or something... Whats the deal with brown coal?
- Retric 5y agoThe is talking about coal, the largest power plants are hydroelectric dams. Add them, wind, solar and nuclear and your talking 37% of total electricity generation. Even gas turbines which generate 23.7% of power produce significantly less CO2 per GWh.
- Jedd 5y agoIt's likely true, but quite probably even worse. A friend here in NSW Australia told me some years ago, while working at one of the larger coal-fired power plants we have, that emissions are measured on only one of the four stacks, and the results are then extrapolated. Obviously this was ripe to be gamed, which is precisely what happened. Good coal (black, low-emission, cleaner-burning) was used to power that turbine, the other three turbines got the low-quality / high-emissions brown coal. Either way, studies like TFA rely on the accuracy of the data that different nation states collect and publish, and I seriously doubt the accuracy of much of those data.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ip26 5y agoSlightly adjacent, but this is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to GHGSat & MethaneSat.
- elevaet 5y ago> It's likely true, but quite probably even worse. "Worse" is kind of better, because big improvements can be made by focusing on these big polluters.
- pmichaud 5y agoAssuming the big polluters are real instead of being the most honest. If they are just more honest instead of being more polluting, worse is worse.
- ulrikrasmussen 5y agoVery good point. This should be relatively easy (compared to the general problem of climate change) to find out though, by picking a random subset of them and thoroughly measuring their outputs. If the findings here are true, it sounds like it's one of the cheapest ways to cut a big chunk of our emissions. All nations should have an interest in funding the rapid construction of alternatives to these power plants.
- HALtheWise 5y agoI viscerally hate this title, because the top 5% of power plants probably also account for >50% of electrical generation, and the entire exercise is dominated by how small of a plant counts for the statistics. If all the portable generators sitting unused in people's garages counted, I bet that 0.1% of "power plants" would be responsible for 99% of emissions, which would make a great headline but still wouldn't tell you anything meaningful about the world. I would love to know about how efficiency varies with plant size (are bigger plants more efficient?) but this study is _mostly_ just stating that bigger power plants produce more emissions in absolute terms, which should be obvious to pretty much anyone.
- xcskier56 5y agoPlease read the article. Near the end they delve into details that may interest you. Quote: “If the top 5 percent of polluters lowered their emission intensity to the global average for fossil fuel plants, the world’s CO2 emissions could drop by 25 percent, the study found.” So while these plants emit a lot due to their size, they are also much worse (28%-75% per the article) on a co2/kw generated basis as well. (At least according to this article)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- credit_guy 5y ago> the world’s CO2 emissions could drop by 25 percent That's impossible, as the total power-generation related emissions count for less than 25 % of the total emissions [1]. [1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-05/global_emissions_sector_2015.png https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-05/global_emiss...
- jlengrand 5y agoThat is possible, because the article uses 'global emissions' to talk about 'global emissions from electricity generation'. It's repeated several times through the article, though it may not be super clear. I think they just wanted to avoid repeating themselves all the time
- pm90 5y agoLink to the actual study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1/...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aetherspawn 5y agoSo ... how do you convince a country without money to spend a grand lot of money to clean up their CO2 emissions? Does a first-world country offer to pay them billions...? Or perhaps a first-world country should blacklist them from global trade until they become compliant. Perhaps they can't afford it, and it would be seen as a bad act. Either way, what they dump in the atmosphere affects everyone. What they dump in the ocean, too. Also sad to see Japan on that list. I thought that they were generally more technologically advanced than the other countries on the 'blame list' which tend to be generally 2nd/3rd world. After all, they have pioneered robotics, process engineering, cutting edge trains, and electric/hydrogen/hybrid automotive for several decades now.
- Dumblydorr 5y agoChina is paying countries in Africa to install fossil fuel infrastructure. So, actually the opposite of what you write is already happening.
- bakuninsbart 5y agoThat seems counter-intuitive, why should China pay for other countries energy sectors? Do you have a source for this?
- schemescape 5y agoThey could sell carbon offsets to fund the replacement.
- syockit 5y agoWhere is the carbon offset going to come from?
- aetherspawn 5y agoCarbon offset futures I guess. Still, the moment that the government says "you need to pay big for your CO2" and the company decides "OK, let's buy some carbon offset futures offshore", that distills down to "let's send a billion dollars offshore for no tangible product", in which case from a capitalist POV they've basically donated the money. What would motivate the government not to just take it as tax money instead and use it to build more energy in their own country.
- gedy 5y ago> If the top 5 percent of polluters lowered their emission intensity to the global average for fossil fuel plants, the world’s CO2 emissions could drop by 25 percent, the study found. If coal and oil plants in the top 5 percent of polluters switched to natural gas, global emissions would drop by 29.5 percent. Finally, if the top 5 percent of polluters incorporated carbon capture and storage (CCS), global carbon emissions from electricity generation would drop by 48.9 percent, This is really encouraging news, and good example of why I personally don't like getting distracted by per capita and other similar metrics that draw attention away from raw output.
- peterburkimsher 5y agoI took action by sharing this link to the 綠色公民行動聯盟Green Citizens' Action Alliance group in Taiwan, to encourage them to protest about the coal plant in Taichung. https://www.facebook.com/gcaa.org.tw/ https://www.facebook.com/gcaa.org.tw/ What are you doing to help? If you live in Poland, India, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, or Japan - contact an activism group, and ask them to gather support! It is shameful for the governments of those countries to read reports like this about themselves, so I hope that they might be stirred to action that will help improve the environment and save the world :)
- mx-e 5y agoIf the EU keeps the current Emission Trading Scheme the European plants will soon be retired. They are already becoming unprofitable due to high prices for certificates. See: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/new-eu-climate-proposals-accelerate-german-coal-exit-and-industry-transformation-think-tank https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/new-eu-climate-proposal... https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/rising-co2-prices-increase-pressure-on-eu-coal-fired-generation-10-03-2021 https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/risi...
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago73% of carbon emissions from electricity generation, not total emissions. Still, that means retrofitting the worst power plants with CCS systems could have massive benefits.
- rusteh1 5y agoThe referenced research mentions Belchatow power plant in Poland as the most polluting of all. This was an interesting fact about efforts toward carbon capture at the plant I found. [1] "Carbon capture initiative at the Belchatow thermal power plant PGE signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Alstom in December 2008 for the design and construction of a pilot carbon capture plant (CCP) at the latest unit of the plant. PGE signed a grant agreement of €180m ($245m) for the installation of carbon capture, transport, and geological storage facilities in May 2010. The project was expected to be completed by 2015, but canceled in 2013 following environmental opposition to underground storage of carbon. If completed, it would have captured 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 a year." I don't understand why there would be opposition to storage of carbon? [1] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/belchatow-power-plant/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/belchatow-power-pl...
- dna_polymerase 5y agoLooks like the story is a little different: https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/belchatow.html https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/belchatow.html They didn't get the money from the European Union and therefore it wasn't built. The opposition to carbon capture thing isn't even in the wikipedia article about the plant, looks like your source isn't the most trustworthy.
- tbrownaw 5y ago> The opposition to carbon capture thing isn't even in the wikipedia article about the plant, looks like your source isn't the most trustworthy. That is a very strange inference to make. Here's an abstract that claims environmental risks for ccs, and lack of political support (which I understand tends to come in the form of funding?) as a result: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261918300916 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062... This PDF says it was cancelled due to delays in "transposing" (implementing at country level I think?) the necessary regulations to allow funding: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154669777.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154669777.pdf The Wikipedia article about the plant references this politico article, which does mention environmentalist opposition to ccs (that's not what they referenced it for, of course): https://www.politico.eu/article/paperthe-eus-failed-ccs-ambitions/ https://www.politico.eu/article/paperthe-eus-failed-ccs-ambi...
- DoreenMichele 5y agoSeems like we have some relatively low hanging fruit available for making some meaningful improvements if we will just put our heads together and figure out how to arrange to buy them out or something instead of our usual bellyaching about how we are doomed and it's all pointless, we gonna die!
- rockyour 5y agoSeems that all power plants on the list are Lignite powered - it is a special kind of coal, known for the worst co2-eco-balance. „As a result, environmental advocates have characterized lignite as the most harmful coal to human health.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite For me, who lives in Germany and always thinks that the Germans have a good environmental awareness, it is quite remarkable that they have not yet switched off. But fortunately there are elections in September.
- sersi 5y agoGerman have terrible environmental awareness. They are irrationally anti nuclear to the point where they keep coal plants running long past the time they should have been stopped all for the sake of stopping nuclear power. Switching to renewables is a laudable goal but the steps should have been phasing out coal first instead of nuclear first.
- imtringued 5y agoCDU is still popular. Germany might have a prominent green party but that is about it. It's only been in the last few years that other parties started caring about climate change. It's probably because the greens managed to sneak in a CO2 tax.
- Tenoke 5y agoThe CDU was pretty much the only one that wanted to keep nuclear with while near everyone else (except for AfD iirc) opposing them. By the time Fukushima happened the public sentiment and opposition was too strong for the CDU to keep attempting to push for nuclear. Blaming them on this specific issue is just odd when they literally had the least fault out of everyone.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y agoCoal plants are still running for economic/labor (and political/identity) reasons, not because they are needed.
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- ranieuwe 5y ago"Top 5% of <category> accounts for ~75% of global <category> emissions" is a template that can likely be used for far too many categories.
- stabbles 5y agoThe Pareto principle applies often, and it would be great news if it did to CO2 emissions.
- lvs 5y agoI suspect that many recently posted articles appear to be upvoted heavily because they externalize the blame for emissions. This feels a lot like a bargaining phase, in which we are grasping at the notion that the impending sacrifice should be anyone else's but our own.
- 57844743385 5y agoIf the world made sense then we’d launch missile strikes and destroy them.
- pvelagal 5y agoMisleading title ? Its Global emissions caused by “electricity generation”. Power generation is 25% of overall global emissions.. so this is about 73% of the 25%.
- top_post 5y agoIf a cohort of countries pooled resources (like COVAX, WHO, NATO, etc) and focused on fucking off these plants, would that not be a big step towards the global goals? Edit: COVAX was a bad example to use, my bad.
- ttiurani 5y ago> One of the challenges climate activists face is determining who exactly is to blame for the climate crisis, No. Even though researching these power plants is valuable to find low effort / high reward actions, blaming buildings is almost as bad as blaming each individual separately with carbon footprints. Both are diversions meant to make people not look closely at colonial fossil capitalism. The problem is systemic and only system level solutions can be effective.
- mx-e 5y agoIts at least misleading, if not downright calculated, to switch back and forth between the top 5% of plants and the top 10. The top 5% represents at least an order of magnitude more than that. Second, CSS has never worked to date and probably won't work for at least the medium term - meaning we cannot solve the current climate crisis with it. https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-accept-carbon-capture-has-failed-heres-what-we-should-do-instead-82929 https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-accept-carbon-captur... Which leads to the conclusion that cutting electrical CO2 emissions which account for about 25% percent of total emissions by 30% won't cut it in the least. Also we'd then have built gas-fired power plants with a lifetime of 30+ years, when really we need carbon neutrality by 2050.
- NonContro 5y agoThe cheapest and most effective climate change intervention we could stage would be to get a few busses of activists and shut down the entry of workers and coal shipments into power plants, and to disable equipment. The EU has about 300 coal power plants. With 100 people at each, that's only 30,000 people. In 2019, 300,000 people joined the 'climate strike' in the UK alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2019_climate_strikes#:~:text=The%20September%202019%20climate%20strikes,from%2020%E2%80%9327%20September%202019.&text=The%2020%20September%20protests%20were,climate%20strikes%20in%20world%20history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2019_climate_strikes.... At this coal plant in Germany, just five people were able to shut it down for several hours, saving 26,000 tonnes of CO2: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/no-regrets-activists-who-shut-down-power-plant-await-sentence https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/no-regre... We could probably pull this off just with the backing and resources of a multi-millionaire, to pay someone to organise the activists, identify the locations and equipment, and to bail them out of jail and defend them in courts.
- lm28469 5y agoYeah but then you'll run out of electricity real quick... This isn't a sustainable nor effective solution at all
- NonContro 5y agoIts unlikely that the plants would be shut down completely, but these kind of frequent interruptions will be enough to push up their operating costs, and edge them closer towards closure. Basically a 'people-driven' carbon tax.
- IMTDb 5y agoSo basically: disregard the law, perform potentially dangerous actions and justify those by invoking "the greater good" because of course your political view are obviously aligned with everyone else best interest. I do believe that we need to close coal powered plants. I do not believe that taking private, unannounced, disorganised and illegal initiatives is the way to do it.
- amai 5y agoAlready in 2007 Greenpeace published a "Ranking of the most polluting power stations in Europe": https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/european_dirty_thirty_may_2007.pdf https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/european_dirty_t... Nothing has changed since then. The two most polluting powerplants in Europe are still running: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
- H8crilA 5y agoImagine rediscovering the Pareto distribution a million times, over and over again, in all kinds of places and structures. How long can you keep the crowd entertained? 100 years? 1000 years? It's been going on for well over a century already
- jokoon 5y agothis is going to end with violence...
- PoignardAzur 5y agoSo, I'm gonna address the elephant in the room... I don't know much about oilprice.com, but aside from the obvious information we can get from its name and general presentation, the first ad I see going on the site is a sponsored article from Saudi Aramco (the national Saudi oil company). I'm confident saying this is the exact kind of lobbying outlet that would have the strongest incentives to deflect attention away from the oil industry by publishing articles about how the coal industry is worse, regardless of whether these articles actually help environmental policy. That doesn't mean the article's claims are automatically false, just that we should be skeptical of them... and with this skepticism in mind, I'm not impressed with the headline "Top 5% Polluting Power Plants Account For 73% Of Global Emissions" implies that you could remove 73% of all CO2 emissions, whereas they're actually talking about CO2 emissions from electricity production, a much smaller fraction. tldr Maybe there's an insight in there, but it's drowned in the corporate hot-potato throwing.