The greener the colour, the more climate-friendly the electricity ...

March 21, 2022 6:44 PM

electricityMap shows the carbon intensity of the electricity generated in countries and regions around the world. It's open source. Sadly, missing data from China, Russia, Africa et al.

Toggling the sun and wind buttons is supposed to show the potential for wind and solar power in each region. Hat tip to thePrepared.

posted by storybored (33 comments total)

Shocking how much carbon output natural gas generates compared to the others since it is sold as the "cheap, clean" alternative to coal.

There's no reason for the Southwest Power Pool to rely on coal at all, Kansas alone has the #2 wind generation potential, along with West Texas (part of which is in the pool). Neither of those places require much electricity, there's no real heavy manufacturing in either places, if transmission could improve and further investment we could export.

I've worked for at least 3 of the PTOs on the map and they, more correctly the power companies that are part of the PTOs, actually love the power saving thermostats and renewable energy. They're a business and if they can regulate prices without being beholden to the coal market, and not have to ramp up operating costs when power spikes, they make money. Really only energy companies create the weird paranoia around renewables and saving energy.
posted by geoff. at 7:22 PM on March 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Interesting concept, but the data seems pretty broad. It also does show where there is export, but not relative intensity of generation and use. For example, New England is shown as one singular region. Vermont has multiple utilities which all have a different profile and also very low generation. We predominantly import our energy, but what is made locally is fairly low impact and a lot of the import is from HydroQuebec.

I like the concept, but it feels like this would be most useful for depicting situations with enough nuance to hint at how things might change, which is a bit difficult to see here.
posted by meinvt at 7:25 PM on March 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

> Sadly, missing data from China, Russia, Africa et al.

So count Kwame out but I think 4/5 Planeteers still counts as mission-ready lets gooooooo
posted by 7segment at 8:42 PM on March 21, 2022

This is cool, but also:

Middle Norway
Southwest Norway
North Norway
Southeast Norway
West Norway

Norway, like the oft-referenced Texas, is about the size of my Australian middle-city suburb. I'm not sure a breakdown to such granularity is particularly useful.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:44 PM on March 21, 2022

Norway is reported in that way because those are the bidding zones that the country uses. This site inherited that from the data source they are pulling from for that region (ENTSO-E).

I'm not sure why Norway has so many more bidding zones compared to the rest of Europe. Maybe something to with how much power they export and shift around? Could just be that electricity pricing is a hot topic in Norwegian politics.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 10:47 PM on March 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Norway is fairly big, sparsely populated, and mountainous. It makes total sense for a country that predominantly has population centres far apart, separated by fjords and mountains, to have grid infrastructure that is administered in fairly large areas. Like, each of the Norwegian bidding zones is about the size of Denmark, and far harder to navigate.
posted by Dysk at 10:52 PM on March 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

It seems like the sunlight data is based off the current amount of sun in the area? Like where it is nighttime now it shows no solar capability, at least as far as I can tell. I think it also might be based off current cloudiness, because it seems strange the way it is saying certain areas have very low solar potential.

Still, this is very cool.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:25 PM on March 21, 2022

Nice! This reminds me of a neat little app called EquiWatt I've been using (UK). Connect a smart plug to it and a couple of times a week when the grid is at peak carbon intensity, it switches your appliance off for half an hour or an hour. The grid is willing to pay to cut demand when carbon intensity is high, so the app shares this payment with you, in the form of points and Amazon vouchers etc. Works best with freezers (which can safely be turned off for an hour) and electric car chargers. My freezer costs me £40 a year electricity, and I should earn £20-25 back via EquiWatt. YMMV.
posted by Klipspringer at 11:34 PM on March 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Really interesting. Thanks for the link. I wonder if it takes into account carbon capture and storage (where used) or just assumes the emissions profile of the source without it.
posted by sonofsnark at 11:41 PM on March 21, 2022

OK, now that I take a closer look, the GHG emissions are just applying global IPCC data for that energy source, regardless of what is actually happening at the power plant level. Still interesting, but less accurate than I had hoped.
posted by sonofsnark at 11:48 PM on March 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Norway, like the oft-referenced Texas, is about the size of my Australian middle-city suburb...

I'm assuming you don't mean area, or population (Norway's population of knocking on five and a half million is comparable with Aus's largest cities as a whole, Texas is over five times that). I don't think it's too do with grid capacity either? Texas' ~350TWh/year is over three times Norway's so those two aren't in the same bracket anyway.

What sense do you mean? I'm really curious.
posted by Dysk at 3:12 AM on March 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

It seems like the sunlight data is based off the current amount of sun in the area?

All the data is live, so it's the amount of (grid-scale) solar that's being fed into the grid at any time. The capacity for a given grid area is given on the left when you click on that area. So for example, right now, in the Great Britain grid, wind is generating 7.4GW out of 25.1GW capacity and solar is generating 3.85GW out of 13.4GW capacity (it's sunny and roughly mid-day here right now).
posted by ambrosen at 6:15 AM on March 22, 2022

Man, Chile's doing poorly. And we have a ton of wind and water-based generating potential.
posted by signal at 6:17 AM on March 22, 2022

Look at France showing what a meaningful commitment to nuclear power can do. This could be us but half the environmentalist movement had the wrong priority for the last fifty years.
posted by Nelson at 7:49 AM on March 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you want a deep dive in California California ISO has some very nice data displays, even a good mobile app. The graphs I find most interesting are the supply trend and renewables trend which shows a minute-by-minute breakdown of where power is coming from. Also frustrating is the wind and solar curtailment report: we currently generate so much renewable power that CAISO asks facilities to stop producing solar because there's nowhere to put it. The daily reports suggest it's local grid congestion that's the main problem. I don't understand all the reasons for the problem but better energy storage solutions (batteries, pumped hydro) are urgently needed.

Saul Griffiths' book Electrify is good reading for a big picture view of energy and climate change. He estimates that we need 4x the current electricity capacity on the grid in the US if we're going to electrify everything as a means to stop global warming.
posted by Nelson at 7:49 AM on March 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

BTW we're all discussing what the data presented means, but it's remarkable all this data is collected and visualized in such a nice way. It's the work of Olivier Corradi's company ElectricityMap. I have no idea what their business model is; near as I can tell they got a €1m grant from Google in Dec 2021 after partnering with them for awhile to help Google in its effort to be carbon neutral.

ElectricityMap is a spinoff/pivot from Tomorrow which was started in 2016 and seemed to basically be a few smart people in search of a business and funding. They have a thoughtful postmortem on other projects they did including shutting down two previous products, Bloom and North, two other data-driven products to help people and businesses understand their carbon load. They found those weren't viable businesses.

Not sure ElectricityMap is a viable business in the startup mold either. And it shouldn't have to be! Projects like this should be funded purely as a public good, perhaps with a tiny fraction of the carbon tax we should be imposing on all uses of energy. But humanity lacks a political structure to do that at scale. Then again something like ElectricityMap is pretty small and doesn't need a lot; I'm glad Google at least helped get the thing moving.
posted by Nelson at 8:13 AM on March 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Look at France showing what a meaningful commitment to nuclear power can do. This could be us


With an ageing fleet and the next generation coming in massively over budget and way behind schedule?
posted by biffa at 8:16 AM on March 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

I am surprised by Brazil and Peru. (I am not surprised by my own country, but I am disappointed. Nor Australia, aside from Tasmania. I knew there was a reason I always get along with them.) Thanks!
posted by eotvos at 8:47 AM on March 22, 2022

half the environmentalist movement had the wrong priority for the last fifty years

The nuclear power industry still can't explain where all that waste is going to be safely stored for millennia. Solve that problem and we'll talk.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:46 AM on March 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

The nice thing about coal and gas power plants is there's no question where the waste goes. You just vent it into the atmosphere. And the storage is free! Well, in most countries; in a few places there are big meanies trying to actually charge a fee.

But my crack about nuclear is mostly just sour grapes. To be fair to 70s environmentalism, there wasn't the understanding we have now on the massive harm CO2 emissions were doing. Also it's not just environmentalist pressure that makes nuclear power so unviable, as biffa alludes to above it's also just so complex and expensive that it is not an easy solution. France is something of a counter-example but their nuclear approach is no magic answer either.

Here's a breakdown of electricity generation globally. (Source is pro-nuclear, they cite the IEA for this data.) 10% of the world's electricity is generated from nuclear. 63% is fossil fuels. 24% is renewables. ElectricityMap shows France is 55% nuclear, 12% fossil fuels, 28% renewables.
posted by Nelson at 12:57 PM on March 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

The nuclear power industry still can't explain where all that waste is going to be safely stored for millennia. Solve that problem and we'll talk.


Coal power accounts for 100,000 deaths per terawatt hour of production.

Nuclear accounts for a mere 90 deaths per terawatt hour.

Why don't we ask the other question, when coal or oil stops killing people at a scale 1000x larger than nuclear, then we'll talk.

Want to talk about the world's worst nuclear accident? Chernobyl, probably 4,000 deaths in the long term from cancer. Fukushima, the worst nuclear accident in the past 30 or so years? 1 death in total.

Worst hydro power related accident? Banqiao dam failed and killed 175,000 people and destroyed 30 cities.

Most policy is driven by fear, unfortunately. But yeah, humans are irrational (see also: fear of flying when you had a higher chance dying on the drive to the airport) so this is the world we will continue to live in.
posted by xdvesper at 6:24 PM on March 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well it's very human to be irrational, to be afraid of flying. That last line was not meant as criticism, but rather as an explanation for the state of world we live in.

In any case, it's way better for the "world" if the radioactive waste is stored somewhere, even it leaks, the effects are mostly localized, as opposed to coal power where there is even less chance of containing all the CO2 and other pollutants that were released into that atmosphere, which continues to have a global-scale impact on our biosphere - collapse of ocean food chains due to acidification, or collapse of global agriculture.

But yes I took it to be self evident that fossil fuels are a huge source of human mortality. Some reputable articles if you wish:

The Guardian: Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found.

Multiple academic studies are referenced: most have similar methodology, working off the known link between air pollution and heart / lung disease, then using satellite / air quality data to correlate variations in pollution with mortality within different countries. Again, for many of them, you would need an account (perhaps with a university if you're a student / post-grad student) to read them.

Even the UK government has declared that "Air pollution is the biggest environmental threat to health in the UK, with between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths a year attributed to long-term exposure. There is strong evidence that air pollution causes the development of coronary heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and lung cancer, and exacerbates asthma."
posted by xdvesper at 10:09 PM on March 22, 2022

You're addressing the risk entirely in terms of deaths caused so far. That rather misrepresents the risk associated with nuclear power. The issue there isn't what has and is going wrong, but what might, just how badly that can go, and the time scales those problems can exist over.

But even aside from that, doubling down on the "I'm the only rational one!" attitude that was called out isn't particularly friendly.
posted by Dysk at 11:40 PM on March 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Here's your rational: New nuclear costs way more than new wind and solar.

And nuclear may have a negative learning curve, meaning it tends to get more expensive as you build more.
posted by biffa at 4:22 AM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting that my home province (Manitoba) is showing "data unavailble" on here. It looks like the map depends on real time feeds of data, which might explain that.
Our power company is literally called Manitoba Hydro, because somewhere in the high 90s percent of their generating capacity is hydroelectric dams...a feed of generation stats would basically be a horizontal line.
posted by Kreiger at 8:49 AM on March 23, 2022

Been wishing I could find my copy of Daniel Yergin's The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World which is definitely around here somewhere. (I have a mole of books.)
posted by neuron at 8:57 AM on March 23, 2022

For anyone interested in thsi sort of thing, there is a live update of the GB electricity mix here. Its a lovely sunny day today so solar is making a decent contribution but wind is relatively low, so gas is filling in. Its quite an interesting format because from day to day you can see which technologies are coming in to meet spikes in demand. Basically GB electricity demand on a weekday is flat at night, ramps up from 5-8am and is pretty flat through the day, then spikes 5-7 then falls off again back to the flat by bedtime. Solar obviously falls away towards dusk. Nuclear stays on all day as it won't ramp. The format breaks down FF vs RE but also pulls out embedded generation (which i assume means anything connected to the distribution grid (inc solar panels on houses) vs big stuff connected to the transmission grid.
posted by biffa at 9:18 AM on March 23, 2022

Here's your rational: New nuclear costs way more than new wind and solar.

100% agree with this. Why would we bother with nuclear, with the risks associated with nuclear waste, and the extremely high cost of compliance / safety processes when we could just use wind / solar instead. I was just responding to the fearmongering about the "dangers" of nuclear which are miniscule compared to the existential threat that coal / fossil fuels pose to the entire planet, not to mention the staggering death toll it already inflicts.

I live in Australia which has the highest installed PV solar per capita, and unique in the world, most of that PV is owned at the personal level - not by corporate power plants. Talk about people owning the means of production... On top of that, thermal solar hot water is mandated for every new house built. I'm a huge proponent of solar!

That being said, I have to say that thinking about it, there is a rational case to prefer coal over nuclear at the local level - because of externalities.

You live next to a nuclear power plant, you bear the consequences if something goes wrong.

You live next to a coal power plant, well, the rest of the world bears the consequences of increased CO2 emissions.

Though, as we've seen throughout history, it's the poorest people who live next to the most polluted places (cheap land etc) and it's true that we put the poor people in the shadow of coal power plants to breathe in that toxic air.
posted by xdvesper at 4:55 PM on March 23, 2022

The nuclear power industry still can't explain where all that waste is going to be safely stored for millennia. Solve that problem and we'll talk.

Where-ever they put it, it won't be spread around the entire globe the way that pollution and climate change from fossil fuels are. We will need every tool in the tool box to make the transition away from petroleum, including nuclear.
posted by ambulocetus at 8:14 PM on March 23, 2022

Using nuclear to transition away from fossil fuels is like using a credit card to pay off your debts - solves the problem today, by making a bigger one tomorrow (now you've got to transition away from nuclear onto renewables! You thought giving up coal and decommissioning those plants was fun, well...)

Just skip the outrageously expensive, uniquely dangerous technology that ultimately relies on a falling supply of uranium being dug out the ground. You'd be moving off it to solar, wind, hydro, etc in a few decades anyway.
posted by Dysk at 11:20 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately we don't have "a few decades". We're already at 1.1°C of warming and we're basically too late to avoid 2°C. 3°C is looking inevitable. Not that nuclear, now, is a solution to all of that; it takes a decade+ to bring nuclear online. Solar and wind can be deployed much faster and are better environmentally than nuclear. But then you have a significant energy storage problem that there's no great technology to solve.

In other complexities, the Economist had an article this week about Germany's plan to shift from coal to natural gas as a partial effort to fight global warming. This will have a meaningful impact; while it's not zero the carbon emissions of natural gas are half of coal. Coal is 72% of Germany's CO2 emissions from electricity; shifting it all to natural gas would cut the total emissions by 18%. Only that's now all in question given Germany's primary natural gas supplier Russia just removed itself from the world order. Germany is also shutting down their working nuclear power plants as part of an environmentalist promise made after the Fukushima disaster.

None of this is simple.
posted by Nelson at 10:16 AM on March 24, 2022

We don't have decades, but the solution isn't an incredibly expensive option that leaves long term pollution we don't really have a plan for dealing with, at best we can contain it and hope to work on hazard signage that can outlast civilisation itself.

There is so much that can be done with wind, hydro, solar, tidal, and investing in some grid scale storage.
posted by Dysk at 5:11 PM on March 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was just responding to the fearmongering about the "dangers" of nuclear

Acting as if expressing concerns about nuclear power is fearmongering about fake "dangers" is simply counterfactual in a world with a long list of nuke-related catastrophes.

I track the energy industry as part of my job. I'm quite aware of the devastating costs of fossil fuel use. Deflecting questions about the problems of nuclear power with "but coal is worse!" doesn't address those questions.

The answer, as biffa said, is renewables, which are far cheaper than nuclear at this point. The "we're the only smart, rational ones in the room" nuclear advocates still don't seem to have caught up with this fact.

The Biden administration just auctioned off a bunch of sites for massive offshore wind farms near NY and NJ, and are planning similar auctions off the Carolinas, Oregon, California, and in the Gulf of Mexico. This is where the smart money is going. Nuclear is not only hazardous, it's absurdly expensive and increasingly irrelevant.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:49 AM on March 26, 2022 [3 favorites]