CO2 emissions from electricity generation in 2015 were lowest since 1993 | Hacker News Reader

CO2 emissions from electricity generation in 2015 were lowest since 1993

eia.gov

113 pointsOsiris3047 comments

This is great news, but people should understand that this is largely being driven by fracking, not renewables, so it's not without environmental consequence.

(Fracking lowered the price of natural gas in the US tremendously, which has made it more cost effective compared to coal.)

Also, as the US moves away from coal and towards natural gas, we haven't exactly left our coal in the ground -- we've just increased exports so it is consumed abroad.

US coal exports are dropping.

According to the EIA, we exported 97,256,746 tons in 2014 but only 73,957,888 tons in 2015, a drop of 24%

source: https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t7p01p1.pd...

China's coal imports have fallen off a cliff:

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/new-china-energy-data-coal-i...

http://www.reuters.com/article/china-economy-trade-coal-idUS...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-13/china-coal...

China is also going head long into renewables:

http://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/06/china-renewable-growth-s...

Zoom out a bit and look at the broader trend. Coal exports were at record highs for several years, but have indeed come down a bit since China's economy slowed.

Increased efficiency is definitely a contributing factor as well. It's very inspiring to see that our population and economy have both grown, yet demand for electricity has remained flat.

It's extremely hard to find unbiased reportage on fracking, but Wikipedia has a total of four* groundwater incidents, none of which seem to be slam-dunk conclusive one way or the other. And even if they're all due to fracking, coal is a whole lot worse. Coal companies are failing left and right.

*most of which appear to be peripheral to fracking proper; fracking possibly enabled the activity which led to an incident in most cases.

It doesn't help that the film "Gasland" is chock fill of disinformation.

It may be that remotely deployed water treatment at frack sites is the answer to both fracking effluent and injection wells. But this is one of those cases where when somebody does have accurate information, they're suspected of flackery because of who they are.

We all knew ( or should have known ) that fracking was to be used to enable gas as a bridge between coal and alts. It's not going to be perfect, but it's doubtless an improvement.

I think this is wonderful, but this chart [1] seems to indicate that the decrease in coal use is really only replaced by the increase in natural gas.

Natural gas seems to release less CO2 than coal burning, but it would be much nicer to see the nuclear and renewables climbing at a faster rate. Hopefully the 2015->2025 trend is far better.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2016.05.13/chart3.pn...

I noticed the same thing. You could say it's because natural gas has become a cheaper fuel alternative to coal, or that the world is more interested in burning cleaner fuels. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

Definitely natural gas is cheaper. And also world leaders are starting to get spooked by global warming. Fear trumps banal economics.

Natural gas releases less CO2, but it releases more methane in the shipment process, which is far more potent as a climate change agent than CO2. Depending on which estimates you buy into on the amount of methane lost, natural gas may be worse than coal for climate change.

There's still other reasons natural gas is a better fuel, though. Plants come on & offline more quickly, there's no need for emissions scrubbers & no truly noxious combustion byproducts. There's also no steam output or water consumption, though as there is still waste heat maybe that doesn't matter.

There's also potential to get natural gas plants up to 60-80% efficient, which means still less CO2 production compared to a 30-40% for coal.

That is until things like this happen:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak

That's really something. We'll see if it stays plugged.

The other thing about combined cycle plants is they are cheap. A big worry for anyone building a power plant is the long term economics, especially capital costs. Obviously you want the plant to run profitably long enough to pay off the bonds.

For Combined cycle low capital costs means the financial risk involved is much lower. Much more likely it'll pay off the capital costs. After that if the economics get dodgy it can be run intermittently or mothballed. IE, the utility isn't stuck paying off bonds on a plant that is shut down.

Flip side is coal fired plants have higher capital costs, longer payback and high financial risk. If carbon taxes make your plant uneconomic to run before the capital costs are paid off, the owners take a bath. (Nuclear and solar plants have the same issues, very high initial capital costs)

At least the Methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere for geological periods of time.

The damage caused to water tables and such caused by extracting natural gas does last that long though, it's not a very good solution.

It's not quite that simple because the overall impact of an individual compound relies on both its atmospheric residence time and infrared absorption. This article[1] covers the basics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

That doesn't really contradict adrianN's point in any way. If you integrate methane's heat retention over now to 100 years from now it still beats carbon dioxide. That doesn't mean that if you integrate from 50 years from now until 100 years from now it would still win. Much less so if you look at a geological time period in the future.

What do you think happens to the methane in the atmosphere? It doesn't vanish. Most of it reacts in the statosphere and troposphere and oxidizes into ... you guessed it: Carbon Dioxide.

10% gets eaten by organisms in the soil, but at least 90% turns into CO2.

Of course, Natural Gas thermal combined-cycle electricity generation is MUCH more efficient than Coal, no matter which way you look at it. (Unless you have an old already-paid-for coal plant next to a coal mine and only care about dollars)

For apple to apple comparison Green House Gases values are converted to CO2e (CO2 equivalent). This was a standard practice when I was in the industry. The article it self does not mention it, But I am pretty sure the graphs have CO2e values not CO2.

> it would be much nicer to see the nuclear ... climbing at a faster rate.

Good luck convincing a nation of fear mongering people that nuclear energy is safe. The whole argument of not in my backyard comes to mind.

Solar panel prices are dropping fast enough that I may actually consider putting one on my house and keeping my house at a nice 70 degrees all year round.

Normally I feel AC is something we should try to do without. But come to think of it, if you can actually power an AC unit with panels on your roof, aside from manufacturing the system, it's fairly elegant. You're harvesting & then releasing energy that was bound for that patch of land anyway. Like capturing rainwater on your property and redirecting it through your garden.

> Good luck convincing a nation of fear mongering people that nuclear energy is safe.

I despise nuclear be its no longer cost effective, not because it uses uranium for energy production.

I'd live near a nuclear plant if they offered me free heat in the winter! But alas, nuclear's time has come and gone for commercial electrical generation.

The IEA World Energy Outlook, and other realistic detailed future energy scenarios (including IPCC reports) say we're going to double or even triple nuclear power production from now until 2050.

Have a citation? All OECD reports I've seen show little to no expansion of nuclear except in possibly China and India. Nuclear power is going to need to come in under 3 cents/kwh to compete against solar and wind.

Nuclear power doesn't have to compete with solar and wind during quiet winter nights-- it gets to compete against batteries + solar/wind.

Grids with a lot of renewables are also dealing with a lot of stress on the electrical grid: http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-07/when-grid-says-no-wind...

It's a solvable engineering problem, but the meta operations problem is: "is it cheaper to have a grid that is 50% nuclear and 50% renewable, or a grid that is 100% renewables with a lot of battery-stations to absorb/emit the variances"

Only in the most pro-nuclear estimate is that true.

The 2014 IEA report gives two numbers, 413 GWe (low nuclear) and 1092 GWe (high nuclear) estimates for 2050. Compared with today's 377 GWe.

And they've been revising those numbers downward each of the past several years since Fukushima.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...

Not an expert, but I thought nuclear waste disposal was a huge unsolved problem too, rather than plant safety.

8% to 13% in 10 years is not nothing.

Also, the idea behind the renewables push/subsidies was to get it past the early years where it is not competitive with fossils. We've been hearing rumblings that we are roughly at the point where this changes, so in another 10 years we might see an increased growth rate.

So, some good news.

The world needs an energy storage system for renewables the moment we find something the carbon emissions from power generation will fall of a cliff.

Note that this is in the USA, not the world.

demand for electricity remained relatively flat over the previous decade.

To me, that might be the best news in the whole press release.

Aging population, efficiency, etc. Peak energy (consumption) has been reached in the first world.

I think you left out de-industrialisation as one of the major causes.

Thanks for adding that, although I think textiles are the majority of energy intensive manufacturing (which, of course, has moved overseas).

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=13431

Society has yet to grasp the ramifications of stagnant to declining populations in almost all of the first world and China. Capitalism and the fractional reserve banking systems dominating the world depend upon constant expansion, long story short we face a demographic nightmare generations in the making. The citizens are best represented as Wiley Coyote who's run off the edge of the cliff but hasn't looked down.

Agreed! Although, I'd say we as a society have the opportunity to live relatively scarcity-free in the not too distance future (enough food, energy, clothing, shelter for everyone); we must decide if we'll embrace the opportunity.

Absolutely, the not too distant future is going to be interesting one way or the other, it is too late to change the inevitability of demographics and the subsequent bubble they've produced. Of course the truth will get you down votes on hacker news

> Although, I'd say we as a society have the opportunity to live relatively scarcity-free in the not too distance future (enough food, energy, clothing, shelter for everyone)

For centuries its been true that every generation has had the resources to live "relatively scarcity-free" in terms of having the resources to provide enough food, energy, clothing, and shelter for everyone, based on the standards of a time in the not too distant (from the point under consideration) past.

The problem has always been:

(1) Resource distribution,

(2) Standards moving forward over time.

I don't see much prospect of that changing in the not too distant future.

First world may have reached Peak energy for NOW .

I predict after 2025, once Self driving ELECTRIC Cars/trucks are Norm and Industrial Robots make great strides with the New deep learning AI, resulting in general purpose Industrial Robots to do jobs in Construction & Agriculture etc.. Energy consumption going to increase at a RAPID rate.

On Kardashev Scale of Type I,II,III Civilizations, It is estimated "we Planet Earth" will reach Type I status in 100–200 years.

The GOOD News is from NOW On, all the New Energy production is from Renewables (mostly Solar )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize.

I only see energy use going up if we discover the ability to perform molecular assembly. If that occurs, yeah, energy use would skyrocket, but it would all hopefully be clean energy at that point.

Even if you were to replace everyone in manufacturing, construction, etc with robotics, and replace all ICE vehicles with electric vehicles, you wouldn't see an enormous increase in energy use.

The US DOE showed several years ago that almost 80% of vehicles could move over to the electric grid with existing base load generation. I stand by my previous statement that developed country energy consumption has peaked.

>almost 80% of vehicles could move over to the electric grid with existing base load generation.

hmm... I am little surprised with that DOE math.

Avarage US Houldhold use 900 KWh per month as per link below. Electric car takes a total of 425 KWh to re-charge per month ( based on 1000 miles driven per month, see my own Nissan LEAF calc. below)

So by 2025-30 when USA Electric vehicles are 25% (of Total vehicles), USA grid needs 12.5% increase in base load.

When 80% are EV, then US need 40% increase in base load.

---- How much electricity does an American home use? https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

In 2014, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,932 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of 911 kWh per month. ----

Here is my household Electricity consumption monthly breakdown in Kwh (from my Utility PG&E monthly bill) - I drive Nissan LEAF 100% Electric car about 1000 miles per month ( typical US avg.)

Nissan LEAF re-charge* : 425 Kwh ( monthly total )

other household electrify: 400 Kwh ( I am low on household Kwh use, that is why I took US Avg 900 Kwh in above Calc.)

* The fact that I re-charge Nissan LEAF only After 11 PM to get Off Peak rate of 11 cents Kwh, my Utility Bill show "Off Peak Kwh used in a month" , that is how I know exact KWh used for my Nissan LEAF re-charging.

Don't forget. Aging population. Seniors don't drive as much as working age citizens. And the number of baby boomers retiring is the largest cohort in history to move into that age range.

U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050 http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/02/11/us-population-proj...

If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants, according to new projections developed by the Pew Research Center.

Your study is almost 10 years old.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/americas...

Combined with immigration greatly reduced, and the US fertility rate below replacement rate (1.88 births/woman), we're on a shallow population decline, not a rise.

Your link doesn't back up your conclusion.

US census for 2014 says we'll hit 400m by 2050: https://www.census.gov/population/projections/data/national/...

Consisting of an increase of almost 50m native born; and 30m foreign born (between now and 2050).

@rgbrenner post below with US census data confirms US Population rise till 2050.

In my above post my calculation of required increase on US electric grid base load is based on 'one CAR' per household which I just realized as wrong calculation.

Based on the info. below US avg. Household size is 2.6 , then number of CARS per household is at least 2.

so when 25% of cars are Electric Cars, you need 25% increase in utility Electric base load, and for 80% EV cars you need 80% increase. That is huge!!!!!!!!!!!!

@toomuchtodo , anyway It is good discussion. I am glad I digged all this info in order to reply. Now it is crystal clear in head what are the US electric grid increasing load needs for the next 20 years.

Hope our Policy makers and Politicians do this simple MATH and prepare with more SOLAR future accordingly ..

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

# of Households: 133,957,180

# of people in a household: 2.6

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