A friend here in NSW Australia told me some years ago, while working at one of the larger coal-fired power plants we have, that emissions are measured on only one of the four stacks, and the results are then extrapolated.
Obviously this was ripe to be gamed, which is precisely what happened. Good coal (black, low-emission, cleaner-burning) was used to power that turbine, the other three turbines got the low-quality / high-emissions brown coal.
Either way, studies like TFA rely on the accuracy of the data that different nation states collect and publish, and I seriously doubt the accuracy of much of those data.
I'm sure things are gamed, at least within what the letter of what regulations allow if not further.
But NSW does not mine brown coal or have brown coal power plants, and buying brown coal from other mines would obviously attract attention. But the design differences between brown and black coal plants at all stages from fuel processing, injection, burning, and waste extraction are so different between brown and black fuel that you couldn't just flip between them even if you had the fuel on hand. So I doubt the accuracy of this rumor too.
Hmm, you're right. This was a comment made to me about a decade or so ago, when this person was at, or had just left, Liddell power station. It was definitely gamed in the way I described - the best coal went into the one burner that was actually monitored - and I'm guessing I since assumed that to mean brown went into the other three.
- it looks like NSW has a range of coal qualities being mined, and I'm sure even slight deltas in price, at the quantities we'd be looking at for a power station that size, would reward this behaviour.
As an Australian that has just returned after 15 years away, it baffles me there are Australians who will iterate the differences between "Extraordinarily mind-bendingly bad" and regular old "horribly bad" like it makes a difference.
"Clean Coal" is actually a joke and I'm genuinely shocked people fell for it. Murdoch has A LOT of control here.
> As an Australian that has just returned after 15 years away, it baffles me there are Australians who will iterate the differences between "Extraordinarily mind-bendingly bad" and regular old "horribly bad" like it makes a difference.
I don't know what you're getting at or how it relates to what I wrote. Black coal generation is about twice as good as brown coal for emissions intensity of production of electricity and gas is about twice as good as black coal. These differences and other differences in efficiency are extremely important if you're looking to minimize emissions, which is the subject of the article.
The "thejuicemedia" channel has a great series of "Honest Government" ads on Australian coal and energy policy ... expect a stream of expletives. Sample ad:https://youtu.be/OL8a1YEhk_o
They have plenty of "ads" treating other topics as well.
Very good point. This should be relatively easy (compared to the general problem of climate change) to find out though, by picking a random subset of them and thoroughly measuring their outputs.
If the findings here are true, it sounds like it's one of the cheapest ways to cut a big chunk of our emissions. All nations should have an interest in funding the rapid construction of alternatives to these power plants.
Yes, this is the very tricky aspect of regulating pollution. There’s so much room for dishonesty in reporting due to the complexity of the processes, that without thorough investigation a simple plan may end up causing the opposite effect.
That story doesn't really check out. Brown coal and black coal come from different coal fields, and those power stations in NSW are powered by nearby coal fields. Brown coal in particular is so energy-poor it's not really worth transporting it anywhere. Brown coal needs a different furnace design, too, to account for the high moisture content.
Seems more likely that there's some random efficiency differences between the units due to differences in build/maintenance history and the monitoring is done on the unit that's known to be the best-performing one, and that's been exaggerated as it goes through the rumour mill.
Yup, see my reply to the sibling comment made at about the same time as yours.
I've mucked up with the brown coal assumption (mining and power generation are not my thing) but I don't doubt the accuracy of the report from my engineer friend that the highest quality coal they shipped in went into the one burner that was carefully monitored, and the cheapest / lowest quality material went into the others.
You can see the enormous pile of washed and graded coal at the southern end, fed by a network of conveyors that leads to the Ravensworth CHPP to the southeast.
If it’s on a country basis they probably just tabulate the energy carriers(brown coal/coal/gas/wood/etc.) times the carbon factor, not on individual coal plant reporting.
I viscerally hate this title, because the top 5% of power plants probably also account for >50% of electrical generation, and the entire exercise is dominated by how small of a plant counts for the statistics. If all the portable generators sitting unused in people's garages counted, I bet that 0.1% of "power plants" would be responsible for 99% of emissions, which would make a great headline but still wouldn't tell you anything meaningful about the world.
I would love to know about how efficiency varies with plant size (are bigger plants more efficient?) but this study is _mostly_ just stating that bigger power plants produce more emissions in absolute terms, which should be obvious to pretty much anyone.
Please read the article. Near the end they delve into details that may interest you.
Quote:
“If the top 5 percent of polluters lowered their emission intensity to the global average for fossil fuel plants, the world’s CO2 emissions could drop by 25 percent, the study found.”
So while these plants emit a lot due to their size, they are also much worse (28%-75% per the article) on a co2/kw generated basis as well. (At least according to this article)
Your assumption is wrong. Reading the linked paper [0], it measures the CO2 output vs energy output (kg CO2 per MWh), and these are indeed hyper emitting plants compared to other similar sized plants. The paper also discusses the capacity of these plants, which is not even close to > 50% of the total electricity generation, as you suggest.
Reading the actual study, it does seem their rank for "top 5% polluting" is total emissions. They do calculate relative intensity, as you say. But the ranking for plants with greatest emissions was done without regard for capacity.
Also, the "73%" reduction would only be for GHG's from electricity-generation, not all sources.
I mean, obviously coal is a pretty awful fuel from an environmental standpoint and it's good to quantify these things. Just reading these are hard when the authors didn't necessarily make 100% clear the last few tables.
You're absolutely right, and they probably are a significant proportion of generation. However, a key part of optimization is identifying low hanging fruit - replacing (or augmenting) these plants could help reach climate change goals in really short order. Fission is known for being slower to deploy than other green energy sources, but if we could eradicate this carbon source in 5-8 years, then... damn... that's really impressive.
If some country decided that the operation of these power plants was a sufficiently offensive attack, they could bomb them. This would probably be a disaster for quite a few reasons, but it would strongly discourage the plants from operating.
A gentler approach would be a well designed cross border emission tax. This could make operation of these plants economically impractical.
How about taking the money to bomb and instead just like... build replacement plants? Why can't we just directly try to make things better instead of trying to punish people (especially who might not actually have the resources/power to do it themselves)?
The plants are being run because they are cheap and have plentiful supply, not because they are the most desirable form of production.
Merely adding a new tax would be the most regressive solution available, as it disproportionately hurts the poorest- the consequences would take longer but could end up just as severe. Maybe they dont have access to plentiful natural gas, or grid storage for renewables. Maybe they simply dont have an economy healthy or government free enough of corruption to invest in the capital required to transition.
A more reasonable approach would be to set up a program that fronts the necessary investments while letting the locals retain control... effectively a free loan. It would certainly meet the criterion of "gentler", at least, and probably cheaper than fuelling the planes and the bombs as well- those things are crazy expensive.
Germany, Japan and SK are extremely wealthy countries. I am sure they can manage if they really want to.
Germany in particular made the stupid decision of shutting down nuclear plants (Fukushima overreaction) and it is pushing this narrative of being a green energy country… to me it sounds like an easy problem to solve once there is enough political attention.
Nobody, not even Germans think it is a green country, they aren't pushing that narrative. Who told you that lie?
Most likely you fell victim to American newspapers lying to you that Germany is pushing a green narrative. After all they lied about Germany moving back to coal. What happened is that Germany willingly delayed reductions in CO2 emissions. It clearly cared about the nuclear shutdown more than the coal shutdown. However, the articles are always about how emissions went up "because more coal" when that never happened. It's lies upon lies.
Germany is a country that is standing still, neither getting better nor worse and likes it that way. It's not green and nobody pretended that it is green.
Most countries are very far away for the amounts of renewable production where one needs grid scale storage before being able to build more wind turbines and PV.
Not sure you understand how wars and diplomacy work. Remember how 9/11 strongly discouraged global American military and economic power? Neither. Or how Germany was justly punished into submission for causing WWI. They really were humbled into not starting any more wars weren't they?
> “Another major reason is that many high-carbon production chains were outsourced from developed nations to Chinese cities, thus increasing the export-related emissions of the latter.”
The solution possibly is something more radical than what you're thinking, because the PRC forcing emissions reductions and driving up manufacturing costs could just cause these industries to jump to the next exploitable developing region. I'm thinking more along the lines of strategies to reduce consumerism in general, or match global product prices to their "true" cost considering environmental damage - ideas most pro-infinite-growth capitalists find untenable.
Whenever I hear that China is the biggest polluter, I think that all they need to do is divide themselves into twelve countries, then none of them would be the biggest polluters anymore.
Per capita stats are kind of misleading though because China is still an impoverished nation in many parts that can't emit much but still have a massive population. If you just focused on the per capita of the cities (actual developed areas) vs per capita of cities in the US, Europe etc, the story would flip on its head and revert back to it simply being the biggest polluter.
Where are you coming up with this number: >50% of electrical generation of the entire world from top 5% of power plants -- ?? I went to the link and to the linked article, I didn't see anything about >50% generation, or even what is the actual Wh produced by these plants?
Kind of insane the article and the linked discussion don't include HOW MUCH POWER these places make. I've been reading through those two and I can't find that simple fact.
Misleading title ? Its Global emissions caused by “electricity generation”. Power generation is 25% of overall global emissions.. so this is about 73% of the 25%.
Title should be changed to "Top 5% of Power Plants Account for 73% of Global Electrical Emissions" that way it stays under the character limit and is more truthful.
The is talking about coal, the largest power plants are hydroelectric dams. Add them, wind, solar and nuclear and your talking 37% of total electricity generation. Even gas turbines which generate 23.7% of power produce significantly less CO2 per GWh.
A good start would be phasing out the top polluters ASAP.
The top ten most polluting plants were in Poland, India, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, and Japan. South Korea has three coal-fired power plants among the top ten super polluters. India has two, and the other countries mentioned above have one each.
The optimal and frankly only solution would be the close the coal plant. Arguing that alternative solutions are not "optimal" while continuing burning coal is directly harmful to the environment, green politics and human health.
The first step would be the set a definitive date when the coal plant will get demolished. Once that is done, people can continue to debating what optimal alternative should be constructed but if the date come and there is nothing built then what people get is no power, and the blame then goes to those who refused to build new power plants when they knew ahead that the coal plant is getting demolished.
This is true. But there is the shortest term, say the 2030 goals (go full on wind and solar, there's still plenty of fossil base load that can be shaved off), and the 2050 plus subsequent goals. If we want to go full carbon negative (and we should), then nuclear is necessary.
Solar + battery is great but it isn't enough.
India will be one of the worst affected by Climate Change. That would be nothing compared to the economic cost of Nuclear.
Nuclear should have been built and improved 30 years ago. By the time new nuclear plants bring about their benefits, we have passed the 2,5 degrees celsius warming limit.
Thats an excellent point. The subtext there is borderline positive. Or at least borderline actionable. Anyway Im reading the Ministry for the Future and its August so I need to either kill myself or join the Children of Kali or something... Whats the deal with brown coal?
The referenced research mentions Belchatow power plant in Poland as the most polluting of all. This was an interesting fact about efforts toward carbon capture at the plant I found. [1]
"Carbon capture initiative at the Belchatow thermal power plant
PGE signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Alstom in December 2008 for the design and construction of a pilot carbon capture plant (CCP) at the latest unit of the plant.
PGE signed a grant agreement of €180m ($245m) for the installation of carbon capture, transport, and geological storage facilities in May 2010.
The project was expected to be completed by 2015, but canceled in 2013 following environmental opposition to underground storage of carbon.
If completed, it would have captured 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 a year."
I don't understand why there would be opposition to storage of carbon?
> I don't understand why there would be opposition to storage of carbon?
The biggest reason is that most of the time "we're gonna store carbon" is just smoke and mirrors and in practice never happens. It's the biggest excuse for fossil fuel companies to continue business as usual while promising some solution in the future that never comes.
This PDF says it was cancelled due to delays in "transposing" (implementing at country level I think?) the necessary regulations to allow funding: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154669777.pdf
I have noticed, more and more, energy concerns (like NS Energy seems to be) attempting to discredit environmental groups with this exact accusation:
"We, the energy industry, came up with a Green Solution but environmental groups stopped it for reasons x, y, z"
Where x, y, z is some plausible, fungible combination of "they care more about the spotted owl/some other endangered species" and "they care more about punishing us than being solution-focused" and "it's more of a modern-day religion" -- whatever the reader needs to be willing to accept the energy industry's story about how they're trying to do better but it's the environmental groups' fault.
What's interesting about this to me is, where seeing the propaganda round the Iraq War was obvious and obviously crafted, this is much sneakier.
But I think you'll see this more and more -- the energy industry is trying to solve our environmental problems, they say, and would be able to lead us to a greener world if not for those irrational, quasi-religious, badly-prioritizing environmental groups.
There may be propaganda here, but it also does happen. In California, every solar power station has been sued by the Sierra Club at some point. Usually over some endangered toad, but the real force (and funding) behind the suits is the labor unions, who want the projects to pay them more. It’s a big shakedown.
I cannot tell you how much "the labor unions are using environmental groups as muscle to shut down the good work the energy industry is doing" sounds like propaganda.
I know right? It is hard for me to repeat to be honest, because it sounds exactly like crazy Fox News fantasy. But, I have seen it with my own eyes. The phenomenon first came to my attention in the matter of "Kern County Citizens For Responsible Solar" versus First Solar's Willow Springs Project. The bogus citizens' group is a front organization for union labor who are trying to extract higher wages in project labor agreements. They file their objections on the draft environmental impact reports, which preserves their standing under CEQA to delay the project in the courts.
This site has an extensive archive of such DEIR comments and subsequent lawsuits for hundreds of projects around the state. It's just how labor negotiations are done in California, now. All the letters and motions are the same, all the front groups have the same name except with different cities or counties, and they are all drafted by the same law firm. A typical example is at [1].
Its at least misleading, if not downright calculated, to switch back and forth between the top 5% of plants and the top 10. The top 5% represents at least an order of magnitude more than that.
Second, CSS has never worked to date and probably won't work for at least the medium term - meaning we cannot solve the current climate crisis with it.
Which leads to the conclusion that cutting electrical CO2 emissions which account for about 25% percent of total emissions by 30% won't cut it in the least. Also we'd then have built gas-fired power plants with a lifetime of 30+ years, when really we need carbon neutrality by 2050.
> If the top 5 percent of polluters lowered their emission intensity to the global average for fossil fuel plants, the world’s CO2 emissions could drop by 25 percent, the study found. If coal and oil plants in the top 5 percent of polluters switched to natural gas, global emissions would drop by 29.5 percent. Finally, if the top 5 percent of polluters incorporated carbon capture and storage (CCS), global carbon emissions from electricity generation would drop by 48.9 percent,
This is really encouraging news, and good example of why I personally don't like getting distracted by per capita and other similar metrics that draw attention away from raw output.
I took action by sharing this link to the 綠色公民行動聯盟Green Citizens' Action Alliance group in Taiwan, to encourage them to protest about the coal plant in Taichung.
What are you doing to help? If you live in Poland, India, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, or Japan - contact an activism group, and ask them to gather support! It is shameful for the governments of those countries to read reports like this about themselves, so I hope that they might be stirred to action that will help improve the environment and save the world :)
If the EU keeps the current Emission Trading Scheme the European plants will soon be retired. They are already becoming unprofitable due to high prices for certificates. See:
For me, who lives in Germany and always thinks that the Germans have a good environmental awareness, it is quite remarkable that they have not yet switched off. But fortunately there are elections in September.
> But fortunately there are elections in September.
Laschet has time and again defended lignite ("Braunkohle" in german) and will probably become the next chancellor. Write an email to your local green party branch and ask how you can help!
German have terrible environmental awareness. They are irrationally anti nuclear to the point where they keep coal plants running long past the time they should have been stopped all for the sake of stopping nuclear power.
Switching to renewables is a laudable goal but the steps should have been phasing out coal first instead of nuclear first.
CDU is still popular. Germany might have a prominent green party but that is about it. It's only been in the last few years that other parties started caring about climate change. It's probably because the greens managed to sneak in a CO2 tax.
The CDU was pretty much the only one that wanted to keep nuclear with while near everyone else (except for AfD iirc) opposing them. By the time Fukushima happened the public sentiment and opposition was too strong for the CDU to keep attempting to push for nuclear.
Blaming them on this specific issue is just odd when they literally had the least fault out of everyone.
I suspect that many recently posted articles appear to be upvoted heavily because they externalize the blame for emissions. This feels a lot like a bargaining phase, in which we are grasping at the notion that the impending sacrifice should be anyone else's but our own.
Seems like we have some relatively low hanging fruit available for making some meaningful improvements if we will just put our heads together and figure out how to arrange to buy them out or something instead of our usual bellyaching about how we are doomed and it's all pointless, we gonna die!
Imagine rediscovering the Pareto distribution a million times, over and over again, in all kinds of places and structures. How long can you keep the crowd entertained? 100 years? 1000 years? It's been going on for well over a century already
If a cohort of countries pooled resources (like COVAX, WHO, NATO, etc) and focused on fucking off these plants, would that not be a big step towards the global goals?
So ... how do you convince a country without money to spend a grand lot of money to clean up their CO2 emissions?
Does a first-world country offer to pay them billions...?
Or perhaps a first-world country should blacklist them from global trade until they become compliant. Perhaps they can't afford it, and it would be seen as a bad act. Either way, what they dump in the atmosphere affects everyone. What they dump in the ocean, too.
Also sad to see Japan on that list. I thought that they were generally more technologically advanced than the other countries on the 'blame list' which tend to be generally 2nd/3rd world. After all, they have pioneered robotics, process engineering, cutting edge trains, and electric/hydrogen/hybrid automotive for several decades now.
> they have pioneered robotics, process engineering, cutting edge trains, and electric/hydrogen/hybrid automotive
A common theme among these technologies is that they make for lucrative business. Automotive business is big, robotics and process engineering make for better yield (as for trains, maybe they just have passion for trains). Not so for clean energy. Japan had a large chunk of energy generation coming from nuclear power until 2011 so there wasn't any incentive for looking for alternative solutions as what they had was already clean and cheap. It's been 10 years since the disaster but I think that is still not enough time for them to have an alternative solution running.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your question, but my understanding is that funding carbon emission-reducing projects is one of the ways carbon offsets typically work.
> When you buy an offset, you fund projects that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Edit: maybe you meant "how is it reducing carbon in the atmosphere today?" whereas I meant reducing total emissions over a period of time that extends into the future. A sibling comment brought this up as well.
Still, the moment that the government says "you need to pay big for your CO2" and the company decides "OK, let's buy some carbon offset futures offshore", that distills down to "let's send a billion dollars offshore for no tangible product", in which case from a capitalist POV they've basically donated the money. What would motivate the government not to just take it as tax money instead and use it to build more energy in their own country.
I don't know much about oilprice.com, but aside from the obvious information we can get from its name and general presentation, the first ad I see going on the site is a sponsored article from Saudi Aramco (the national Saudi oil company).
I'm confident saying this is the exact kind of lobbying outlet that would have the strongest incentives to deflect attention away from the oil industry by publishing articles about how the coal industry is worse, regardless of whether these articles actually help environmental policy.
That doesn't mean the article's claims are automatically false, just that we should be skeptical of them... and with this skepticism in mind, I'm not impressed with the headline "Top 5% Polluting Power Plants Account For 73% Of Global Emissions" implies that you could remove 73% of all CO2 emissions, whereas they're actually talking about CO2 emissions from electricity production, a much smaller fraction.
tldr Maybe there's an insight in there, but it's drowned in the corporate hot-potato throwing.
> One of the challenges climate activists face is determining who exactly is to blame for the climate crisis,
No. Even though researching these power plants is valuable to find low effort / high reward actions, blaming buildings is almost as bad as blaming each individual separately with carbon footprints. Both are diversions meant to make people not look closely at colonial fossil capitalism.
The problem is systemic and only system level solutions can be effective.
The cheapest and most effective climate change intervention we could stage would be to get a few busses of activists and shut down the entry of workers and coal shipments into power plants, and to disable equipment.
The EU has about 300 coal power plants.
With 100 people at each, that's only 30,000 people.
In 2019, 300,000 people joined the 'climate strike' in the UK alone:
We could probably pull this off just with the backing and resources of a multi-millionaire, to pay someone to organise the activists, identify the locations and equipment, and to bail them out of jail and defend them in courts.
You may not want to take the risk to get injured. Three years ago, there was in France massive protests from the "yellow vests" that started because of the increase of the tax on diesel (which was lower than gas, and so the most popular type of vehicle), a problem for the poor-middle class.
A number of people lost an eye or an hand because of blast balls or gaz grenades that were not launched properly. A few died. Some were beaten by the police in situations not requiring "legal violence".
The government and the police used to say it was the fault of the protesters. But now we have smartphones to film, so in these cases there are… investigations that lead nowhere, the culprit from the police is never identified.
It can be seen as a tactic to instill fear and reduce the protests.
Also, take a burner phone because it can be taken by French police as it could have been a tool to organise an unlawful activity (and you may not see it anytime soon even if you are not guilty and released).
So basically: disregard the law, perform potentially dangerous actions and justify those by invoking "the greater good" because of course your political view are obviously aligned with everyone else best interest.
I do believe that we need to close coal powered plants. I do not believe that taking private, unannounced, disorganised and illegal initiatives is the way to do it.
I'm tempted to consider the logistics of the idea.
The rule of law, and the expectation that society's problems won't be solved through violence, are important pillars of our civilizations and shouldn't be discarded lightly.
On the other hand, there's a very real possibility that climate change will destroy our civilization. When the greater good is "avoid the death of billions"... then yeah, private illegal action is starting to look good.
Not that good. If you look at the fact that associations like Greenpeace that were built on doing what OP suggests have probably offset the development of nuclear power by decades, and gotten us that much closer to global disaster, you realize that direct activism can have bad consequences too.
But good enough I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
Not all views are political, my friend.
If I'm a person who lost all my property and dear ones in a forest fire, would you also say my view on closing the coal plants is political?
Absolutely: your views regarding the policies governing the future of coal plants are political. You are entitled to hold those views based on your past experience. You are entitled to voice your opinion and vote accordingly. You are not entitled to enforce those views by force outside of the legal framework if the world does not suit your preferences.
Its unlikely that the plants would be shut down completely, but these kind of frequent interruptions will be enough to push up their operating costs, and edge them closer towards closure.
A friend here in NSW Australia told me some years ago, while working at one of the larger coal-fired power plants we have, that emissions are measured on only one of the four stacks, and the results are then extrapolated.
Obviously this was ripe to be gamed, which is precisely what happened. Good coal (black, low-emission, cleaner-burning) was used to power that turbine, the other three turbines got the low-quality / high-emissions brown coal.
Either way, studies like TFA rely on the accuracy of the data that different nation states collect and publish, and I seriously doubt the accuracy of much of those data.