Clean energy strategies can miss true carbon emissions avoided if they’re based on regional and annual averages, Power Finance & Risk reported May 10 in a story by Taryana Odayar.
Increasingly popular “24/7 clean energy” strategies can miss project details if they’re based on regional and annual averages, Power Finance & Risk reported May 10 in a story by Taryana Odayar.
“That strategy ignores the sub-regional transmission congestion that can have a significant impact on carbon intensity,” the magazine quoted REsurety CEO Lee Taylor saying on Norton Rose Fulbright’s May 4 Currents podcast . Instead, REsurety has a new way to measure carbon called “Locational Marginal Emissions” that looks at exactly where and when energy is added to the grid.
“We have a common enemy which is that not all megawatt-hours are equal, so a megawatt-hour generated from one location can be meaningfully different from another location based off of the electrical grid that that’s operating,” Taylor said on Currents. “As companies are trying to go carbon-neutral, carbon-free, carbon-negative, they need more than annual megawatt-hour accounting to do that effectively.”
Power Finance & Risk linked to REsurety’s white paper with The Brattle Group on LMEs, which compares two solar projects in West Texas. One displaces twice as much carbon because it has access to transmission to displace coal-fired generation, while the other curtails another nearby solar plant. The result helps companies such as Google that are committed to 24/7 strategies find out exactly how much carbon they’re reducing.
Full article (subscription required): http://www.powerfinancerisk.com/Article/3988459/AES-reveals-plans-to-replicate-Google-PPA-across-US.html
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