Using Electricity
2022-03-18 18:33:06.196249+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
I'm engaged in this Cool City Challenge thing. Petaluma got a large grant to be in the second round of cities implementing it, and being active in my neighborhood I figured I ought to participate. And it's a mixed bag, I'm glad to meet a few more of my neighbors, I'm still skeptical about the overall program.
The current project is calculating carbon load for your home, which has sent me down the usual rabbit holes. This Twitter thread talks about the value of rooftop solar in Seattle, and handwaves over some issues about time of day of generation (peak use does correspond to peak sun, so more solar can help smooth demand that might go to higher carbon sources), but does point out that the IPCC figures that, given that so much solar capacity is built in China using coal fired plants, rooftop solar is working out to 41 g CO2eq/kWh, 90 lbs/MWh. Sonoma Clean Power's two options work out to 80 and 64. So rooftop residential photovoltaic likely increases our CO2 emissions.
But the other issue is that my going lower carbon on my electricity just makes the high carbon electricity cheaper for other people. Which brings us to: