How much CO2 is emitted owing to power generation?

If there’s one sector that’s the favourite whipping boy when it comes to CO2 emissions, it is the power generation sector, and for the right reason – because it is the single largest emitter sector of CO2!

So, of the total 35 billion tons of human-activity based CO2 emissions, how much is emitted by the generation alone?

Power generation accounts for about a third of total emissions of carbon dioxide. There are about 50,000 power plants worldwide, small and large. These power plants together emit nearly 12 billion tons of CO2 per year.

Now you can understand why everyone first looks at the power plants when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions. If the power sector worldwide could cut down its emissions by say 25%, that would be an overall CO2 emission reduction of 7-8%.

Another reason why the power sector is a great starting point when one looks at CO2 emission reduction is that this sector represents large concentrated CO2 emission sources. This implies that by focusing on a few hundreds or in the worst case few thousands of emission sources, a considerable reduction in CO2 emissions can be brought about. Compare it to controlling emissions from distributed sources such as almost a billion cars!

In this context, it is noteworthy to see how much CO2 emissions some of the world’s largest power plants produce. Let’s look at the United States, for instance. Some of the biggest CO2 polluting power plants in the United States are:

• The Scherer plant in Juliet, GA — 25.3 million tons of CO2 per annum
• The Miller plant in Quinton, AL — 20.6 million tons of CO2 per annum
• The Bowen plant in Cartersville, GA — 20.5 million tons of CO2 per annum

All the above are coal-fired power plants.

These three plants alone generate over 75 million tons of CO2, and the top 5 coal power plants in the US cumulatively generates over 100 million tons of CO2 per year.

To satisfy your curiosity on the CO2 emissions from the power sector, I finish off with data on the Top-10 Countries with Highest CO2-Emitting Power Sectors (billion tons per annum) – 2015 data

• China – 2.7
• United States – 1.8
• Russia – 0.66
• India – 0.6
• Japan – 0.4
• Germany – 0.36
• Australia – 0.23
• South Africa – 0.23
• United Kingdom – 0.21
• South Korea – 0.19

The total emissions from the top 10 comes to 7.2 billion tons per annum, of the total global power plant CO2 emissions of 12 billion tons per annum.