Does anyone have insight into this? I've never pictured Australia as a big contributor to pollution.
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).
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
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...
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.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/04/15/californias-solar-pow...
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?
Not just selling back. Producing - and then either using or selling.
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.
http://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/reneweconomy/
Edit: OpenNEM gives figures similar to reneweconomy: https://opennem.org.au/energy/qld1/
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...
Edit: https://www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au/resources/project-trac...
Edit: thanks
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)
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.
Wind/Solar/Gas, with low emissions intensity and (as of September 2020) the lowest power prices in Australia.
Gas is absolutely not “low emissions”. It’s actually the second worst offender after coal (400gCO2eq/kWh vs 1000 for coal).
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...
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.
If you look closely Germany has 30GW of gas capacity and it's not using it even though it would lower emissions by 50%.
[1] page 5, https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downlo...
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 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).