The good news from the twelfth annual “Benchmarking Air Emissions of the 100 Largest Electric Power Producers in the United States” report from July 2016 is a decline from 2005 to 2014 in CO2 pollution, which is down 15 percent in the decade with preliminary data suggesting that CO2 emissions declined another 6 percent from 2014 to 2015.
That put CO2 emissions at the lowest level in 22 years, but a longer view of the data is not quite as encouraging. CO2 emissions among the electric producers is down just 5 percent from 1990 levels, suggesting CO2 emissions were on the rise from 1990 to 2005.
But the drop is critical for the United States to reach key greenhouse gas standards, which have a federal target of 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. That goal was underscored by the United Nations agreement reached in Paris in 2015 among 194 countries to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The Benchmark report also says emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury have also dropped since 2000, which is all the more encouraging, the report says, because electricity generation and the nation's economy have both grown over the same period.
The report says that improved energy efficiency, a growth in renewable power and natural gas generation, new energy goals and the retiring of coal plants have all contributed to the decline in CO2 emissions. Nuclear remains the unsung hero in the report. It accounts for 19 percent of the country's electricity generation, but also for 62 percent of the country's carbon-free electricity generation.
The use of renewable power sources more than doubled from 2010 to 2015 and now accounts for 5 percent of the country's power generation, just under that of hydro power's 6 percent. In total, the report says, over 7,100 power plants generate electricity in the United States. In 2014, these plants generated more than 4 billion megawatt hours of electricity. About 67 percent of that power came from burning fossil fuels – either coal, oil or natural gas. Coal alone accounted for 39 percent of the total power generation with natural gas accounting for 27 percent and oil less than one percent.
Consumption growth rates, concurrently, have slowed, then declined. Growth peaked recently at 2.6 percent from 1996 to 2000. It then rose 1.4 percent in the next four years and 0.5 percent from 2006 to 2010. From 2011 to 2015, it shrank at a rate of 0.2 percent.
In the future, “electrification of transport may … drive overall electricity consumption higher. But for now increased deployment of distributed generation, growing investments in energy efficiency programs, slower growth in a mature U.S. economy, and global macroeconomic fundamentals are all contributing to a dampen demand for grid electricity,” the report says.
The report also says that improvements are uneven throughout the industry. The 100 largest producers generated 85 percent of the electric power in the United States in 2014. They also produced 97 percent of all the nuclear power, 89 percent of all coal-fired power and 88 percent of all hydro-electric, 80 percent of gas-fired and 72 percent of all non-hydro renewable power.
Air pollution emissions from power plants are “highly concentrated among a small number of producers. For example, a quarter of the electricity power industry's SO2 and CO2 emissions are emitted by just two and four of the top 100 producers, respectively,” the report says.
Not news to the nuclear power industry: nuclear leads the power source chart in annual capacity factors by a long shot averaging 92 percent in 2015. Coal's capacity factor – the extent to which a power plant is utilized over time – was 55 percent in 2015 with natural gas at 56 percent, hydro at 36 percent and wind taking up the low spot with a capacity factor of 33 percent.
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