How dirty is our electricity grid?

Karachi, August 29, 2007

Everytime my night flight approaching any airports, glimpse of scatterred lights always strikes me: How human spends millions and billions of joules to generate electricity. How millions and billions of carbon are produced from those energy mix.

Most of the time we took it for granted.

Based on facts:

Energy mix of java-bali grid in Indonesia contributes to about 0.75-0.8 ton of CO2/MWh. in India, the national electricity grid has the emission factor of 0.81 ton of CO2/Mwh, while is Pakistan is about 0.43 t of CO2/MWh. Difference lies in higher coal consumption of Indonesia and India in energy mix for power generation while cleaner electricity (of course, in terms of lesser carbon emissions) in Pakistan is due to their high consumption of natural gas.

And do you know that:

Laos produces 98% of their electricity by hydropower? this creates a low electricity emission factor for sure.

Vietnam has almost 52% of of their power generation by Hydro and it was estimated that their electricity emission factor is about 0.62 t of CO2/MWh.

Isn't it interesting to see mapping of electricity emissions all over the world?