6. Does the amount of electricity generated influence GHG emissions?

Open a new worksheet, and notice the new Dimensions andMeasures from the added data.

We’ll need to graph the reported CO2e emissionsvs Net Generation for each facility. (It would be better to use the powerplantname from EIA rather than the EPA facility name.) Some power plants havemultiple generators listed under the same plant ID and name. So, we might wantto use AVG on the measures rather than SUM.


It looks like there’s two distinct trends within the data.Let’s add fuel types and see if we get a clearer picture. Drag AER Fuel TypeCode onto color.

For reference, these are the type codes.

Let’s exclude everything except Coal, Natural Gas, and Distillate Petroleum by filtering on fuel type. These are the three main fossil fuel power plant types.

                           SUN

Solar PV and thermal

                           COL

Coal

                           DFO

Distillate Petroleum (Fuel Oil)

                           GEO

Geothermal

                           HPS

Hydroelectric Pumped Storage

                           HYC

Hydroelectric Conventional

                          MLG

Biogenic Municipal Solid Waste and Landfill Gas

                           NG

Natural Gas

                          NUC

Nuclear

                          OOG

Other Gases

                         ORW

Other Renewables

                           OTH

Other (including nonbiogenic MSW)

                           PC

Petroleum Coke

                           RFO

Residual Petroleum

                         WND

Wind

                         WOC

Waste Coal

                         WOO

Waste Oil

                       WWW

Wood and Wood Waste


So in general, natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal.

6.1.  Addtrend lines.

We can add trend lines to this chart by clickingAnalysis -> Trend Lines -> Show Trend Lines. Note that hovering over the trend line gives a lot of statistical information.

Cool. But why is there a lot of variation between power plants with similar electricity outputs? Could plant efficiency have something to do with it? Onto the next section.