ElectricityMap – Live CO₂ emissions of electricity production and consumption | Hacker News Reader

ElectricityMap – Live CO₂ emissions of electricity production and consumption

electricitymap.org

224 pointsjka101 comments

I found this map very helpful in internet disputes about electricity sources in my country(Poland), because it shows some lesser known facts like:

- We import electricity at an average rate of 1.2GW - mostly from Germany and Sweden - and this number keeps growing.

- Not 95% of our electricity comes from coal(as it's often assumed here), but 75% at most.

- Wholesale electricity prices in Poland are actually higher than in e.g. Germany.

- Solar reached a point where it registers in the mix - single digit percentages so far, but capacity is growing sharply.

As your neighbour (Lithuania), I'd also like to point out your air pollution affects us a lot. Our air quality is a lot worse on days when there is a south west wind blowing.

Now of course not all of that is from burning coal for electricity (Poland had a lot of manufacturing and heavy industry), but if you were to decarbonise in general it would make a big difference to us :-)

From next year, all new homes here are required to generate most of their electricity from renewable sources, so we should start to see a big uptake in solar. I think this comes from EU regulations to decarbonise housing, so maybe there is something similar in Poland?

Oh, I'm painfully aware of that having recently invested in an air purifier - it's a necessity around here.

Unfortunately this pollution comes mostly from heating and trust me - I wish it was coal these people were burning.

To put this into perspective: last year I was celebrating new year's eve in eastern Poland and met a shopkeeper who was complaining that he can't take wood from a local national reserve.

So yeah - sorry about that. A large part of our society is focused mostly on their own convenience.

It seems like you’re saying that people are burning wood. It’s worth pointing out that wood burning stoves are not all the same. Here in America our environmental agency (EPA) has mandated that all new wood burning stoves meet their new standards for emissions. The result is that a new wood burning stove can produce as little as 1/15th the emissions of what a traditional wood fireplace would emit. For the 2020 models, a wood burning stove should release less particulate than a car without a catalytic converter, while a regular fireplace is roughly as bad as an old diesel truck.

It’s still nowhere as clean as even natural gas, but even without switching fuel sources you can do a lot to make wood burn cleaner.

It seems like you’re saying that people are burning wood.

I wish they were. Wood was probably just a part of that gentleman's own "energy mix", consisting mostly of culm(coal dust), trash, coal and wood.

Recently coal dust for heating purposes was outlawed, along with stoves not meeting a certain standard of emissions, but that didn't stop retailers from offering products which were not up to those standards.

Anyway the main issue still appears to be awareness, as many people who could easily afford to use gas for heating still choose to pollute, because it's cheap and convenient.

Yikes. That is a frightening mix of fuel, I’d rather that everyone ran diesel generators, and that’s saying a lot.

> - Wholesale electricity prices in Poland are actually higher than in e.g. Germany.

Wholesale prices in Germany are anything but stable. We have often times where the price is negative and on the other hand sometimes exceeds hundreds of Euros per MWh.

Germany has allegedly 50% renewables in their electricity mix, yet they have one of the highest specific CO2 emissions per kWh in Europe, plus the highest prices.

If you want a positive example, you have to use France.

For comparison:

- France: 17 Cents per kWh, 50 grams CO2 per kWh on average

- Germany: 31 Cents per kWh, 401 grams per kWh on average

Also, the wholesale electricity price is irrelevant to the customer, especially in Germany where renewables receive a guaranteed price per kWh, _independent_ of the current wholesale price which is why our electricity bills are so high.

Germany is currently planning and building 16 gas plants and even two coal plants, so you shouldn’t take Germany as a positive example for decarbonizing the electricity sector. We aren’t.

I’m very glad Poland and the Netherlands are actually planning to build nuclear power plants.

Some providers (I'm thinking of Octopus in the UK) offer tariffs which are closely linked to wholesale costs.

Their "Agile Octopus" tariff has 30-minute pricing windows, estimated the previous day. Electricity is cheap in the early hours where there's a surplus, and expensive at dinner time. Idea being you can charge your EV and do your tumble-drying at the cheapest possible time. There has been negative unit pricing in the past, when generation has far exceeded demand (i.e. early hours of the morning on a windy day).

More info here: https://octopus.energy/agile/

> estimated the previous day

Real time pricing sounds great, but all the supply and demand effects economists love go away when you delay pricing effects by a day... Why do that?

I don't disagree that it has downsides, but for your average consumer, having that advance notice is probably quite useful/reassuring when it comes to scheduling car charges and other essentials.

Wholesale prices in Poland fluctuate as well, but they're still higher at any given point in time.

And wholesale prices matter to investors - recently we had a large coal project shut down because with the added cost of CO2 credits the LCoE was simply too high, so nobody was willing to finance it.

you shouldn’t take Germany as a positive example for decarbonizing the electricity sector. We aren’t.

I'm not, because the UK with its shift from coal to gas+wind and increases in energy efficiency is a much better one. And also a great example how nowadays nuclear means mostly cost and time overruns.

Meanwhile France is operating on a aging fleet of nuclear reactors(35 years old on average), which hasn't increased in capacity for 20 years now. I'm not sure what's their plan when they will be forced to phase out some of the older units.

I’m very glad Poland and the Netherlands are actually planning to build nuclear power plants.

Well it's not going to happen here because these plans were a vessel for corruption from the get go.

On the other hand solar is growing because it's cheap and with two-way metering coupled with incentives homeowners have all the incentive they need to set up their own installations.

How well does solar work in Poland? I mean given that the country is so far north. I would expect wind power generation to be more suitable, especially close to the sea shore.

Wind was growing sharply before the current administration axed it. It's still the leading renewable energy source here though - both in capacity and GWh delivered.

Recently various cronies came out of the woodwork, so there's a chance we will have some weirdly expensive (even for this source) offshore farms.

But it's likely that some of our national parks will be turned into biomass for coal plants sooner - that's something currently in the works at least.

Importing almost enough to do time-travel.

Thanks so much for sharing! The map couldn't be what it is today without the help of the great open source community:https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib

We're also super proud that the data is being used by Google to ensure that they use their data centers more when the electricity is greener and to help them in goal to make their electricity usage 24/7 carbon free in 2030 (https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/247-carbon-fr...)

Martin from Tomorrow (behind electricityMap)

What's going on in Queensland, Australia? "793g Carbon intensity" seems insanely high, especially as compared with Norway/France/Sweden (at 24-41g carbon intensity).

Does anyone have insight into this? I've never pictured Australia as a big contributor to pollution.

Australia is one of the worst offenders (per capita), let me get the numbers.

Edit:

Here are the per-capita emissions of a few countries for comparison. It's interactive, you can add and remove (click "+ Add country" for this as well) countries from the graph as you like: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-ghg-emissions?...

Article on this: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/australia?country=USA...

Consider also posting Aus renewables pipeline data. They’re on track to replace a large component of their fossil generation in the next 3-5 years (South Australia already has no coal) due to the amount of wind and solar ready to be (and currently being) built.

Edit: https://www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au/resources/project-trac...

I do not follow australian development closely, feel free to give details yourself.

Edit: thanks

The thing never mentioned in these data points is the sheer amount of fossil fuel exports either. The numbers are staggering when you include them.

Good observation. I was curious, and it looks like the parser code to retrieve the data is open source; so here's the relevant module for Australia:

https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/24ea2...

The production mix (energy generation by source) source URL is listed on L326.

Opening the dataset in LibreOffice Calc, filtering by Region = QLD1, filtering for Current Output > 0, and sorting by Current Output descending does seem to show that the vast bulk of production reported has fuel source descriptor 'Black Coal'.

If that's a bug in the reported data or source, hopefully the ElectricityMap team can jump in to take a look. The data initially seems legit, from searching for some of the power stations listed.

Edit / addendum: worth searching for Australia in the project's GitHub issues too; there's some existing (although not directly related) investigation & validation work ongoing for that module

The problem is in fact with the source file, it lists just two solar power stations but there are at least 30 in Queensland.

The site is has no idea when it comes to Australia.

Queensland generates a ton of solar

Victoria uses brown coal which is basically damp coal, its incredibly inefficient compared to black coal used by NSW/Qld

Tasmania is basically 100% renewable...

Also - home solar penetration in QLD is the highest in Australia. Is that not factored in to the equation? It doesn't look that way given 0% renewables shown.

This website is pulling information from public sources, so it can only show public generation & consumption information.

If someone is running a grid-tied solar system, outbound energy might be accounted for in these statistics, but it won't show any immediate consumption of that solar generation by the property, nor will it show any battery storage, it's only capable of showing what goes through the energy meter.

OpenNEM is pulling rooftop solar behind the meter generation data from aggregation sources, I’m unsure if ElectricityMap is also polling this distributed rooftop solar generation data.

+1. California has substantial rooftop solar (11 Gwh peak) behind the meter, which isn’t shown in these graphs.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/04/15/californias-solar-pow...

How would behind the meter electricity consumption change the reported amount of CO2 emitted by other electricity production sources?

The map is intended to show the emissions intensity of electricity so if you miss a bunch of electricity from distributed generation you will over-estimate the intensity.

Man that was a dumb question. Thanks for clarifying.

So we'd need electric utility companies to share the live data of how many kwh of solar and wind people are selling back to the grid in order to get an accurate regional comparison of real-time carbon intensity?

FWIU, they're already parsing the EIA data; but it's significantly more delayed than the max 2 hour delay specified by ElectricityMap.

Here's the parser for the current data from EIA: https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/maste...

Should the EIA (1) source, aggregate, cache, and make more real-time data available; and (2) create a new data item for behind the meter kwh from e.g. residential wind and solar?

(Edit) "Does EIA publish data on peak or hourly electricity generation, demand, and prices?" https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=100&t=3

> Hourly Electric Grid Monitor is a redesigned and enhanced version of the U.S. Electric System Operating Data tool. It incorporates two new data elements: hourly electricity generation by types of energy/fuel source and hourly sub-regional demand for certain balancing authorities in the Lower 48 states.

> [...]

> EIA does not publish hourly electricity price data, but it does publish wholesale electricity market information including daily volumes, high and low prices, and weighted-average prices on a biweekly basis.

AFAIU, retail intraday rates aren't yet really a thing in the US; but some countries in Europe do have intraday rates (which create incentives for the grid scale energy storage necessary for wide-scale rollout of renewables).

(Edit) "Introduction to the World of Electricity Trading" https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042115/under... :

> Energy prices are influenced by a variety of factors that affect the supply and demand equilibrium. On the demand side, commonly referred to as a load, the main factors are economic activity, weather, and general efficiency of consumption. On the supply side, commonly referred to as generation, fuel prices and availability, construction costs and the fixed costs are the main drivers of the price of energy. There's a number of physical factors between supply and demand that affect the actual clearing price of electricity. Most of these factors are related to the transmission grid, the network of high voltage power lines and substations that ensure the safe and reliable transport of electricity from its generation to its consumption.

Which customers (e.g. data centers, mining firms) would take advantage of retail intraday rates?

How does cost and availability of storage affect the equilibrium price of electricity?

> how many kwh of solar and wind people are selling back

Not just selling back. Producing - and then either using or selling.

>So we'd need electric utility companies to share the live data of how many kwh of solar and wind people are selling back to the grid in order to get an accurate regional comparison of real-time carbon intensity?

You actually need production numbers for what's used "behind the meter" which by its nature is not directly available live or otherwise and has to be estimated.

>Which customers (e.g. data centers, mining firms) would take advantage of retail intraday rates?

Loads! In the UK you can get half-hourly priced electricity even at a domestic level (with a smart meter) and if you have loads that can be be re-scheduled (mainly EV charging but if you had an electric storage heater that would work as ell) you can save quite a lot of money.

Heavy industrial users definitely move usage around both to avoid expensive wholesale charges but also to reduce their transmission connection charges which (in the UK) are based on their usage during the most congested periods of the year. Water companies will vary pump operations for this reason and water pumping and treatment alone is 2% of electricity use.

Data centers definitely pay on a half-hourly settled basis but tend not to shift their workloads around to take advantage, some data centers will run their cooling systems in such a way as to reduce usage during the most expensive few half hours though. I have heard that larger users like Amazon, FB, Google, will automatically load balance between global centers to reduce electricity bills and carbon footprint.

Reneweconomy's widget shows coal being ~3/4 of the current supply, but solar being the majority of the rest. There does seem to be a bug somewhere.

http://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/reneweconomy/

Edit: OpenNEM gives figures similar to reneweconomy: https://opennem.org.au/energy/qld1/

The map appears to be counting some renewable generation in Queensland as CO2 emitting. There's actually quite high solar penetration.

That said, Australian is a large contributor to pollution. The majority of electricity is still produced from coal. It is improving, but with a federal target of only 20% renewables, a lot of financial incentive to build new generation could be about to dry up.

> The map appears to be counting some renewable generation in Queensland as CO2 emitting

The map is based on figures which (correctly) assume everything creates at least some CO2 emissions over its lifetime. For example Britain's offshore wind farms are scored as 11g/kWh. Sweden's nuclear reactors, 12g/kWh. In some sense a wind turbine or a nuclear fission plant do not actually "emit" CO2 in operation, they aren't burning carbon - but you need a bunch of concrete construction and mining to have these generators, and it's at a scale where we mustn't forget it. Another reason for showing a number is that if you don't, some pro-fossil fuel person is going to say "Ah, but what about..." and so it's all baked in, same way you can find numbers for "carbon emissions" from ground source electric heat pumps. Unlike a gas boiler to heat things obviously the electric heat pump does not in fact "emit" carbon directly, but nevertheless for comparison we can estimate what the overall emissions are for one versus the other (mostly to show that yup, heat pumps are a good idea).

Sorry I wasn't very specific. It appears to be counting solar generation as coal generation, so the amount of co2 emissions is vastly inflated.

It's famously burning a lot of coal. Coal is getting on for 1 gram per watt-hour. (Usually this will be stated as 1000g/kWh). So 793g is indeed very bad, but it's not unusual for a country that's burning so much coal. Poland likewise, big coal mines, coal power electricity dominates.

But notice that this is proportional. Queensland is a pretty big place, but it's only making about 4-5GW of electricity. Whereas a power district in the US might have 20+GW of coal power stations, so even if it's also got 10GW of wind or nuclear or whatever, that's many times more actual pollution.

Warming doesn't care how efficient we are, the totals matter. So in that sense getting from 5GW of coal in Queensland to 1GW of coal in Queensland (an 80% reduction) would make less difference than MISO in America going from 25GW to 20GW (just 20% reduction).

Something is very amiss with the QLD data. A better site for exploring composition of generation is https://opennem.org.au/energy/qld1/. That said, the result is about right for CO2 intensity, if a bit high.

Also the market operator has their own data for CO2 intensity https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e... . General comment - Victoria tends to have the worst electricity supply in Australia in terms of CO2 per kWh (brown coal vs black coal elsewhere)

Specifically about Sweden, the electricity here comes exclusivly from hydro, nuclear and wind/solar.

Look at the energy sources to understand why.

France: Nuclear

Norway: Hydro

Sweden: Hydro + Nuclear

That’s why nuclear in making a comeback in the mind of those who care about climate change.

South Australia: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/

Wind/Solar/Gas, with low emissions intensity and (as of September 2020) the lowest power prices in Australia.

And yet the net result super bad: 256g/kWh to 500g/kWh.

Gas is absolutely not “low emissions”. It’s actually the second worst offender after coal (400gCO2eq/kWh vs 1000 for coal).

> 256g/kWh to 500g/kWh

Where are you getting this? It's true the emissions mix is bad at night, but the absolute amount is what counts. Having a bad emission mix when no energy is being used isn't particularly concerning.

> 400gCO2eq/kWh vs 1000 for coal

That's pre-2014 numbers. Modern gas is better, around 300 gCO2eq/kWh[1].

It's not as good as solar/wind, but the fast startup time means its usage can be minimized and the low cost ($20M for a generator!) means money can be invested in truly environmently friendly sources like wind and solar instead of the money pit of nuclear power.

[1] https://www.winnipeg.ca/finance/findata/matmgt/documents/201...

Those numbers are from electricityMap for South Australia: 201g right now, and 502g 15 hours ago.

During the demand peak, it was 301g.

Speaks for itself.

About the money pit, Germany spent 500 billion euros on wind and solar. And what does it have to show for it? Right now it’s 10x the CO2/kWh of France at twice the price.

What is this 500B euro amount you are talking about?

If they did nothing they would be the same or worse as poland.

If you look closely Germany has 30GW of gas capacity and it's not using it even though it would lower emissions by 50%.

It would be useful in these discussions to look at all energy generation, not just electricity. For Sweden [1] for example we can see that oil (transport), biomass (heating) are big contributors.

[1] page 5, https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downlo...

If curious see also

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17772529

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15998650

Interesting how the opinions of the traditionally emission-happy HN comment section seems to have shifted: in 2017 the top comment pooh poohs renewables. in 2018 the top comment is kind of neutral (talks about showing differences between countries). And in this threads the current top comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24749472 is clearly coal-critical.

This reflects my own experiences, eg questioning frequent air travel no longer gets you barrages of downvotes.

It's important to understand that not only the opinion changes, but the situation in itself. Producing renewables is now much cheaper than a few years ago. Production processes are getting more efficient, thus less co2 intensive and energy conversion rates are getting better.

A few years ago it maybe was not clear that people had a legitimate interest in renewables. The producing companies probably do not care about the environment outside of laws, but if the request for renewables is high enough, a market can emerge and prosper.

This is very hard to predict even for smart economy people unlike me.

Users might also be interested in a map of the actual power infrastructure e.g. https://openinframap.org/#10.72/51.42/0.6706/0.6706 all based from data from OpenStreetMap, where you see how and where the connections between countries are.

it's sad for me to look at maps like this, because my country could be greener if Austria didn't force us into closing our oldest nuclear plant. Now more than half of our electricity emissions are imported.

This USA data seems kind of strange to me. For instance my home state, Kansas, we are fourth in the nation for installed wind capacity, supplying 41% of our energy demand. Our sole nuclear power plant provides an 18% base load. 33% is coal and the rest random crap. We're very population sparse and low population in general. Yet in other areas of the country that are strictly coal and natural gas fired, with a greater population density and higher total population, they're less turd colored. I'm guessing this is a strange interaction between renewable availability or it just might be a lack of available data.

From https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib#data-sourc... :

> Here are some of the ways you can contribute:

> Building a new parser, Fixing a broken parser, Changes to the frontend, Find data sources, Verify data sources, Translating electricitymap.org, Updating region capacities

I sent a few tweets and emails about the data in this region but nothing happened here either

Let's look at PJM:

Gas (39%, 490gCO2eq/kWhr), nuclear (36%, 12gCO2/kWhr), coal (16%, 820gCO2eq/hr), wind (6%, 11gCO2eq/hr). So that's ~327. So despite coal being 16% of the energy production, it is 40% of the emissions and gas is 58% of the emissions.

Looking at NYISO we see a different story. Currently there is a lot grayed out in the gas area. Right now gas is 28% of the total electricity generation while peak of the day it is 39%.

If you look at CISO (California) you'll see the opposite happen. Mid day solar takes over and emissions drop. The famous Duck Curve. They go from 150gCO2eq/kWhr in the morning to more than double that at night. You'll also see wind die down at times. Interesting thing is how hydro changes.

So a lot comes down to how you're providing your base load and what energy sources you are using at what times in the day. If you look around the map a lot you'll see that a lot of countries/areas that have very consistent loads (and hence emissions) export a lot of their energy at those different times. While a lot of people like looking at averages the problem here is substantially complex because there's temporal components (hourly, weekly, seasonly) as well as a lot of environmental factors.

Settles a lot of arguments and removes a lot of BS and preconceived opinions when talking about energy.

Case in point: look at France vs Germany (who has now spent 500 billion euros in renewables).

Now imagine if that money had been spent elsewhere...

Great visualization, great UI, I will share it extensively. It would be great to also get a layer with locations of all major power stations/plants and information on their yearly capacity factors.

I particularly like seeing the flow values on the interconnects. Well done!!!

I took a quick look at the data sources since I was curious where data for Romania and other eastern European countries was coming from [1].

I wonder how accurate and reliable the data is but if it's coming from a central European commission I expect it to be audited and verified.

[1] https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/maste...

Definitely cool, but seems to be missing some data. Even in areas that they seem to have coverage. They have PJM covering the Mid Atlantic region, but none of the actual local companies doing it. Dominion Energy has ~1.5GW of Solar in VA alone. But doesn't seem they take it into account. I am sure this is because Dominion doesn't offer the numbers, but it seems like there is incomplete coverage in areas they are showing coverage for.

The UK imports and exports at the same time (from/to France and Netherlands), which seems to me to just be creating unnecessary joule heating in underwater cables. Is it some kind of price arbitrage? When I did an undergraduate report on the UK electricity network ~10 years ago this happened then as well, so it's not a new phenomenon.

I would have thought that as the grid de-carbonises the greater the diversity of supply the less storage we will need.

It's a bit like food where our wheat crop is down 40% this year but we aren't expecting riots because the rest of the world is up.

Most electricity infrastructure can't move energy more than 1000 miles without substantial (ie. >20%) losses.

Countries with higher voltage distribution systems (there are a few 1 megavolt in China for example) have less losses, but you still don't want to be moving much power across entire continents.

These are high voltage DC systems and the distance in the case of France is only 45 miles.

I think you are (mostly) mistaken. The UK mostly imports from the continent, and occasionally exports. I have never caught an instance of simultaneously importing from France and exporting to the Netherlands (or vice versa). I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it is clearly not common. The direction of flow might change over a relatively short time frame due to changes in the production of solar or wind energy. With these and other production and load changes, some apparently illogical or inefficient things might happen for short periods of time as it is the best way of handling the dynamic grid.

Also, I know nothing about the state of interconnects between France and the Netherlands. HVDC under the quite narrow English channel might well be the most efficient route.

On the contrary, at the time I wrote the original comment, and as I write this, exactly this situation was occurring. Take a look at the map and see for yourself - perhaps it is still happening when you read this.

I also specifically remember 9 years ago during my aforementioned undergraduate report obtaining spreadsheets from the UK National Grid with time segments containing the direction and amount of power transferring via each interconnect (you're going to have to take my word for it... my copy of that data is long gone). These also showed exactly what I described, power being imported and exported simultaneously.

I expect there is a reason for this, perhaps arbitrage but maybe more likely some minimum power has to flow to keep connected sensors/relays/whatever from misbehaving, or some other engineering reason.

Is it possible that the interconnects between France and the Netherlands are already at capacity, and therefore the losses from going 'via' UK are less than the energy we'd need to expend to bolster that capacity?

Possibly, but that seems unlikely to me; I expect there are already loads of interconnects just via normal pylons (but I don't actually know).

This thing again? The colour is only based on source of energy, not actual quantity of CO2 and hence actual impact on the atmosphere. If I had one family on an island burning a coal stove it would be coloured black.

I know the live data is there but it doesn’t affect the colour assessment one little bit.

Also since when is black bad? Bit racist no?

This seems to be completely wrong for Australia.

Live dashboard of our country if the creator is interested: http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/

China: no data available. Most of USA: data "temporarily" unavailable.

I wonder how this will look in the next decades. France is struggling with the replacement of their crumbling nuclear reactors, while Germany slowly but steadily increases renewables.

This year Germany is looking to remove more wind turbines than it adds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr5PEAK1t3U

in the last ten years the exact opposite happened

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out

How is that the exact opposite? Nuclear is usually not counted as renewable. Renewables are increasing in Germany replacing both nuclear and fossil:

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei%3AEn...

And yet at this very moment, Germany is 10x the CO2 output of France (36g vs 390g), after spending 500 billion euros.

Very cool idea but data are seriously lacking, Germany shows 0% solar, and has largest installation of solar energy in Europe.

That's the current solar output at night. The listed solar capacity for germany is 52 GW.

It's showing live data. Being nighttime, there is currently no solar generation. If you click on the country and look at the little last 24 hour visualisation you can see solar production peaking at 23% yesterday in Germany.

https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

It actually shows live output and total capacity.

Solar capacity is listed at 52GW. Wind total capacity is 61 GW, with an mediocre 15% output.

That’s not a lot to show for 500 billion euros...

Australia and India, two very coal and gas intensive areas on the map have very good potential for solar energy.

India is building nuclear power plants which are way more effective in slashing greenhouse gas emissions than solar.

They just started up their first reactor using a domestic design, the IPHWR-700:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPHWR-700

That's great! India also has the world's biggest solar plant and is building more

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

https://constructionreviewonline.com/2020/06/india-awards-wo...

Huh, I didn't expect for Australia to be anti-record holder. Why is that the case?

I guess the combination of having a lot of coal and widespread climate denialism (the current prime minister basically rejects climate science) is a bad combination.

If I understand the visualization correctly, it is real time. There is a lot of solar PV (rooftops especially) in Oz. Wait for the sun to come up and look again...

The site is missing a large amount of Australian renewable generation.

Compare it to http://nemlog.com.au/gen/co2e/ for example.

Australia is addicted to coal, both in consumption and export. It's been a politically hot debate here for 20 years, with mining and resource companies having a heavy hand in our politics.

With Australia's commitment to the Paris Agreement and rapidly dropping prices of wind & solar generation (LCOE now less than coal derived electricity generation [0]), I hope this will change very soon! Also worth noting that China, where Australia sends a lot of coal, has committed to becoming carbon neutral before 2060 [1].

0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/12/wind-and...

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/22/china-pl...

There seems to be a lot of "no data available".

Estonia looks bad, but taking into account that we only produce 0.5GWh (1100g per kwh) compared to Sweden's 15 (40g per kwh), we produce about the same amount of carbon. Kind of misleading in that sense.

Huh? Sweden also has about 10x the inhabitants than Estonia. Why would you not take that into account?

The per-capita point is brought up a lot, but there's a serious flaw that I don't think is very often addressed. If a country has runaway population growth, they can keep their per-capita emissions low, while in total growing their emissions catastrophically as a country. If the rest of the world is able to get their emissions per-capita under control, it doesn't matter if this overpopulating country also has low emissions per-capita if they continue to exponentially increase their emissions, while the rest of world stalls their total emissions. Because of this, I think it's important to keep in mind that both total and per-capita emissions are important.

Which country is that? I'm not sure I know of a country with runaway population growth.

The runaway example is more of a thought experiment to illustrate why emissions per-capita, in isolation, is flawed and can still lead to devastating climate change effects. In reality, there probably won’t be countries with unlimited population growth, but India, Nigeria, and other African countries will be adding several billion people to the planet in the future decades while most of the rest of the world will be even or decline. As climate change effects become increasingly real over the next couple decades, I don’t see the rest of world being amenable to decreased standards of living while other countries add people to developed standards of living. It’s likely countries will try to coalesce around existing populations being assigned a per-capita total emissions limit for their current population. Where a country’s additional population will come at the expense of the existing country’s population’s ability to emit.

Again, I'm not sure that's true. India and almost all African countries are approaching replacement population change asymptotically.

Nigeria is the one stand-out country that has stubbornly refused to become [much] less fertile as it developed. It's quite an outlier (was ~6.4 in 1960, up to ~6.8 in 1980, now ~5.4).

LOL at the y-axis on that graph ;)

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

Isn't the definition of a country quite arbitrary, though, in this context? If we disapprove of the population of a certain country growing beyond a particular size, would we any happier if that country were to split in two, and for their citizens to then double in number? Or for it to split into four countries, and for its citizens to increase their emissions and living standards to the level of more developed nations. I understand the temptation to pick the world as it is now as a standard by which to measure what countries ought to do in the future, but it's terribly easy for a person to do that if they don't then have to live in a country which hasn't yet reached the living standards of post-industrial society.

True, but we produce 30x less power. Sweden probably has more industries though.

Just the theoretical idea that if you would "nuke" the black countries off the map then evertything is green and fine? Not really. Imo it should be rather based on percentage of total emissions of the world. Then map would show where difference needs to be made.

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