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Comment by noselasd | Hacker News Reader

> I've noticed that Switzerland, using a lot of hydropower, has a worse intensity than I expected.

The carbon intensity on the map seems to be for consumed kWh, not produced kWh. The map indicates Switzerland imports a lot of electricity from Austria and Germany which have a much higher carbon intensity.

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Also, if it is really live data, all the high alpine hydro is just pumped storage now. In winter, the high reservoirs don't get much natural feed when no ice is thawing and any new precipitation will decoratively stick to the slopes until spring.

And this is a good representation, because this way it doesn't allow you to outsource your carbon emissions to countries that no one looks at (not on map, or not considered responsible for anything by activists).

Also CERN is currently offline for the winter which gets most of its power from France imports.

I was talking to a CERN physicist once who joked that the reason for the LHC winter shutdown was because France needed heating. It's probably more to do with economics but it's almost true. France has a lot of cheap nuclear power in the summer, and only limited pumped storage capacity to cache it with.

Then this map is irrelevant. Winds blowing out of a country with high CO2 emission actually don't mean anything, since there is not actually high CO2 emission there, they import it from elesewhere.

Wind is there to show potential for wind energy collection from wind farms.

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