EPA Total Greenhouse Gas Data Emissions for 2010: Bad Reporting
EPA has finalized their greenhouse gas data for 2010. Once again, the reporting is lacking and the added step to confirm and highlight the critical issues is missing. This article notes the top emitting CO2 plants to be “Southern Co.’s Robert W Scherer power plant in Juliette, Ga. (22,978,929 metric tons); Southern Co.’s Bowen coal plant in Cartersville, Ga. (21,026,397 metric tons); Alabama Power’s James M. Barry coal and gas plant in Quinton, Ala. (20,752,490 metric tons); Luminant’s Martin Lake coal plant in Tatum, Texas (18,701,286 metric tons); and Duke Energy’s Gibson coal plant in Owensville, Ind. (17,993,350 metric tons).”
First the obvious, poor Barry plant is lumped in as the top 5 largest emitting plant. Barry barely makes the top 50. The article should have noted James H. Miller Jr. plant, not Barry, which is another coal plant in Alabama.
The second and more important issue is the focus on plants that emit the most CO2. In reality these plants are just large, but efficiently deliver CO2. The EPA could have easily linked up with the EIA to show the energy produced at each of these plants in 2010. It is obvious if you are larger plant and supply electricity to millions of people you will emit more CO2. The “bad” plants are really the plants who fail to efficiently deliver energy when the technologies exist to do so. I have taken my time to link the two databases together.
The worst top 30 plants, in terms of CO2 emissions per MWh, combined emit more CO2 than Scherer. The Scherer plant actually is in the 300’s in terms of worst plants in CO2 emissions per MWh. Many people want to focus on the top emitters without normalizing the scale. Failure to look at the numbers in a different light will result in poor conclusions to the problem.
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