Presumably, more efficient plants will have a loweremissions intensity. Can we prove this?

Unfortunately, we don’t have an emissions intensity orefficiency Measure. We need to create these.

Let’s start a new worksheet and go to Analysis -> createcalculated field:

7.1.  Createemissions intensity field (CO2 per MWH)

Calculated fields work very similarly to Excel equations,except they often do column by column calculations rather than cell by cell (e.g. A * B rather than A1*B1, A2*B2, etc).

We can create an emissions intensity by dividing the“Reported CO2e emissions” Measure by the “Net Generation” Measure. The syntaxrequires measure names (or dimensions) to be in Bracketts:

7.2.  Createefficiency field (energy output / energy of fuel input)

Let’s also create an efficiency measure, defined as theenergy produced divided by energy within the burned fuel. That is, ([NetGeneration (Megawatthours)]*3.412)/[Elec Fuel Consumption MMBtu]. Note the unitconversion, from Megawatthours to MMBTU.

Let’s put the efficiency measure on the Columns, andemissions intensity on the Rows (and color / filter on fuel type, as before):

At first, things look very wrong. But, this is likely due toan issue with some data-points rather than an issue inherent in our calculations.Maybe some of the data is just bad. Let’s exclude some of the bad data-pointsand see if there’s any picture for at least most of the data.

We know efficiency cannot be negative, and cannot be morethan one. So, we can Filter the data based on efficiency. Drag the efficiencymeasure onto Filters, and filter on all values:

Still not a great picture. Let’s exclude some of the extremevalues on the emissions intensity. Assume any emissions intensity above 3.0 isbad data.

Finally, an interesting picture! It’s noisy data, but thegeneral trend indicates that more efficient generators have a lower emissionintensity. Furthermore, natural gas plants have a larger efficiency range,whereas coal is fairly clustered. (what other factors could affect this stuff?)

So we’ve really dug into greenhouse gas data and done somecool analysis. But, what about other environmental releases? We can link in theEPA Toxic Release Inventory. 

SUBPAGES (10): 1. INTRODUCTION 2. CREATING 2-D GRAPHS 3. 3-D GRAPHS AND MORE! 4. MAPS 5. MERGE IN EIA POWER PLANT DATA 6. DOES THE AMOUNT OF ELECTRICITY GENERATED INFLUENCE GHG EMISSIONS? 7. CALCULATED FIELDS 7. CALCULATED FIELDS 8. TRI DATASET & TABLE CALCULATIONS 9. DASHBOARDS