Looking for stats

[andrewducker]

Just been reading about the Drax power station. There have been protest recently because it produces a lot of CO2. What's not being mentioned is that it's a massive power station that also produces a vast amount of electricity, and is one of the cleanest coal-powered stations in the UK. What I'm interested in is the amount of CO2/MW that electricity production results in, for different power stations. According to Wikipedia, Drax produces 20 million tonnes of CO2 and 3945 MW of power - that's 5070 tonnes per MW. Is that more than your average plant? Less? Anyone?

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

You want CO2 per MWh(energy) not per MW (power). I think you're implicitly using a MW-year or 8765 MWh. Thus *if* Drax was running at peak production all year, it'd be giving you 578kg/MWh. It's not producing peak energy all the time, though, so its efficiency is much worse.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Oh, the output is given as 24TWh (=2.4e7 MWh) in a year, so the ratio is 2e10 kg/2.4e7 MWh. This gives 833kg/MWh, which is, as expected, worse.

The Wikipedia article also has two figures for annual CO2 output - 20.8Mtonnes and 22.8Mtonnes. The higher figure gives 950kg/MWh.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine protested there. We had quite an argument about it.

I have no problem with people peacefully protesting but some of the people brought wire cutters and broke in with the intent of shutting down the power station.

Protesting, yes. Shutting down a major power station (which I suspect could risk peoples lives), no.

He didn't see it like that though - he was just saying how many lives were being lost by running the thing.

Although it is irrational people like that put me off the whole movement, and their cause.

[dreema.livejournal.com]

and after a hard day's protesting, he'd go home using a hydrocarbon burning vehicle, put the kettle on and settle down in front of the sofa to watch tv. I wonder where the power comes from that lets him do that...

[ninox.livejournal.com]

Used to be involved with a whole bunch of evironmentalists. I often find they let themselves down by not placing things in context or looking at the whole picture. For a while it was a traditional Friday night ritual of persuading them not to free the animals in local pet shop. Then being woken the next morning with "Greenham Women Fight for Peace" being blared at 5am. Dungarees check, bolt cutters check, Menwith Balls fliers and feminist ranting check. Not endearing but occasionally amusing!

Another friend offered to buy me a goat for my birthday one year to send to Africa and couldn't work out why I was upset at short term solutions and got a lecture of dessertification and sustainability. Seemingly I now have a small patch of local native trees that have been planted somewhere appropriate.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Actually he is pretty consistent with his beliefs, given that he still has a need to exist in our society. He uses little electricity, travels by train when he has to, has a brompton to get to places when he gets off the train, and doesn't have a TV. He has calculated his 'carbon footprint', and is well inside it.

He would reply saying that it is ok to use electricity, it's just that we need to use less, and to produce it in more environmentally friendly ways. I suspect he gets his electricity from a 'green' supplier.

[dreema.livejournal.com]

*nods* that being the case, I'll retract my disparaging remarks.

We're looking to do something similar for our schools. We've had a whole raft of new kit come in, all of which can support the wake on lan feature, so we're currently seeing whether it's going to be possible to shut the majority of the machines down overnight, then bring them up first thing in the morning to do updates and have them ready for start of the school day. Course, we just need to persuade the teachers to power off the monitors at the end of the school day too

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

Every time I hear about this power station I just think of Moonraker and giggle. I wonder if they have entry keypads and whether they play the CE3K theme.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I don't have the figures to hand, but the CO2 output per unit energy for coal-burning plants is always way higher than any other fossil fuel, even accounting for efficiencies.

It's simple chemistry at base: coal is pretty much pure carbon, so all the energy in burning is from turning carbon in to carbon dioxide. Oil comes next: it's mostly hydrocarbons of various lengths, so as well as the carbon it gets a fair proportion of its burn energy from oxidising the hydrogen atoms to water. Gas is the best: it's very short hydrocarbons (mostly methane with a bit of ethane) so the hydrogen ratio is even higher than for oil.

Water is pretty benign as an output in the troposphere, so generally gets ignored. (It's a different case in the stratosphere, mind, where it's a major nasty by many accounts.)

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=260

[andrewducker]

Cheers very much - so it may well be towards the bottom end of coal, but it's still worse than natural gas, and vatly worse than nuclear or any of the renewable sources.