11/14/17: Electricity Map | Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

Hi all,

For those of you who are getting this for the first time, welcome to my semi-regular nuclear energy email. I use this list to share articles that are short (~5 min. read), topical, and highlight themes that are not regularly covered in nuclear energy headlines, but should be.

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Today’s piece is actually an informative website called Electricity Map, which is a “A real-time visualization of the Greenhouse Gas (in terms of CO2 equivalent) footprint of electricity consumption”, broken down country by country.

Electricity Map | Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

The map displays in real time how much CO2 is being emitted by each country’s electricity infrastructure, based entirely on information fed from a long list of public power grid data sources. The carbon intensity of each country is then weighted based on the collective CO2 intensity of that country’s electricity generators.

The details on how this visualization works, what these sources are, and how “weighting” is applied can be found here.

The visualization is not perfect though and not every feed reports every day (you’re probably wondering where the U.S. is). If you dig around the sources, you can usually find the one you’re looking for (here you go).

This information only displays electricity generation and does not include emissions from things like transportation so it cannot be treated as 100% accurate. Nonetheless, it paints an interesting picture of the most significant portion of our energy consumption.

River