Electricity and Climate Change
Project Background
Climate change is an ongoing issue that impacts many aspects of our daily life. According to the United Nations, these effects include hotter temperatures, increased drought, frequent severe storms, food shortage, and rising water levels, to name a few. One of the main contributors to climate change is the burning of fossil fuels. CO2 from fossil fuel accounts for 65% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United States EPA. The electricity sector is the largest producer of greenhouse gases (25%). As the pandemic lockdown in 2020 resulted in more people staying at home on average, we wanted to know if electricity consumption during the pandemic increased, and if it could have worsened our climate by producing more CO2.
We wanted to bring the potential issue of Covid-19's impact on climate change to the attention of policymakers. Fossil fuels are one of the main contributors of climate change and an increased usage of fossil fuels will have more detrimental effects to the planet. We are focusing on electricity generated by fossil fuels and studying how electricity consumption changes during the pandemic in order to determine whether or not the usage of electricity generated by fossil fuels increased, as more people are staying at home. We anticipated an increase in usage of electricity generated by fossil fuels. We want policymakers to pass laws to switch to renewable energy as this does not have detrimental effect to the planet. This solution would be most beneficial in the industrial and residential sectors as they heavily used fossil fuel generated electricity.
According to the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems, some factories in United States ran on renewable energy, but these factories only amount to 12.5% of the total number of factories in the country. There have also been incentives created for the general public to switch to renewable energy such as an increase in property value for switching to solar energy, according to the US Department of Energy, however, the US Energy Information Administration mentions that only 7% of the residential sector runs on renewable energy. These numbers are not high enough to combat climate change and we want policymakers to pass laws to get more people to switch to renewable energy.
We plan to address this problem by creating dashboards and visualizations depicting trends in electricity consumption before and after the pandemic in order to potentially highlight an increase in electricity consumption during the pandemic. CJ will handle the climate change datasets and work with that data to create the appropriate visualizations, while Sammy will handle the electricity data and create the corresponding visualizations for that data. Once we have our findings, we will collaborate to study any trends we see overlap between the two datasets and discuss additional findings. We will use Excel to parse, mine, and filter the data, and Tableau to refine and represent it. Sammy will create the website, and CJ will edit the 5-minute video.
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These are the countries that emitted the most carbon dioxide from 2015 to 2021. Figure 1 represents the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per country in each year. China, India, and the United States consecutively emit the most carbon dioxide each year, so we focused on these three countries for the purpose of the project.
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China, India, and the United States
Figure 1: CO2 Emissions by Country, (2015 - 2021 (metric tons): China, India, and the United States annually emit the most carbon dioxide from 2015-2021. These three countries may have the largest impact on climate change due to the large amounts of greenhouse gases emitted. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Annual CO2 Emissions (Our World in Data)
Questions We Want to Answer
Assumptions
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What is the correlation between increasing electricity consumption in the top three electricity consuming countries and increasing global temperatures from 2015-2021?
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How much did China's, India's, and the United States' electricity consumption increase during the pandemic?
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How much did the global maximum temperatures increase during the pandemic?
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We are assuming that electricity consumption and global temperatures did increase.
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We are assuming that our data is accurate.
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We are assuming that the pandemic affected electricity consumption and global temperatures
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We wanted to compare the electricity distribution among the three sources of electricity generation for each country. We were expecting fossil fuels to be the majority source of electricity generation, however we were not aware how much each country depended on fossil fuels for electricity. From these findings, we were able to get an idea of how much carbon dioxide each country released.
Electricity Generated by Fossil Fuels
(TWH)
(TWH)
Figure 2.1: China's Electricity Distribution: 75% of China's electricity from 2015-2021 is generated by burning fossil fuels. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity consumption from fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables, 2021 (Our World In Data)
Figure 2.2: India's Electricity Distribution: 81% of India's electricity from 2015-2021 is generated by burning fossil fuels. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity consumption from fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables, 2021 (Our World In Data)
(TWH)
Figure 2.3: USA's Electricity Distribution: 69% of USA's electricity from 2015-2021 is generated by burning fossil fuels. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity consumption from fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables, 2021 (Our World In Data)
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For our second question, we wanted to see by how much electricity consumption in each country increased in 2020-2021. Figure 3 indicates the fact that there was an increase, while figure 4 depicts how much electricity consumption increased compared to the previous year. We also see that there is a downward trend in the United States' average electricity consumption in figure 3, while consumption rates are increasing in China and India. From figure 4, we can see that it increased the most significantly during pandemic years in China and India, but in the United States, there was a similar increase in 2018. However, both increases were the steepest in the timeline. As both China and India have the steepest increase in electricity consumption during the pandemic years, we can infer that the increase in electricity consumption was due to COVID-19.
Consumption of Electricity Generated by Fossil Fuels
Figure 3: Amount of Electricity Generated by Fossil Fuels Consumed Per Capita, 2015-2021: There is an increase in electricity consumption from 2020-2021 among all three countries. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity generation from fossil fuels, 2021 (Our World in Data)
Figure 4: Amount of Increase in Electricity Consumption Per Capita Compared to the Previous Year: China's electricity consumption increased by 354 TWHs, India's increased by 206 TWHs, and USA's increased by 250 TWHs from 2020-2021. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity generation from fossil fuels, 2021 (Our World in Data)
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In figure 5.1, we can see that China generated the most tons of CO2 overall from 2015-2021, followed by USA, then India. 2021 was the highest year for China and India, but USA was highest in 2015, which indicates a decline in overall emissions. China also generated more tons CO2 from 2015-2021 than USA and India combined. These values were calculated by multiplying the amount of fossil fuel generated electricity consumed by the carbon intensity of electricity, after the necessary conversions, to attain the yearly CO2 emissions from electricity per country.
China contributed to 60% of the total CO2 emissions from all three countries from 2015-2021, and the total amount of CO2 emitted added up to 32.2 billion tons, indicated by figure 5.2. I converted this measurement into parts per million, as that is the unit for measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide. I found that from 2015-2021, 15.13 ppm of CO2 were released by these countries.
Carbon Dioxide Emissions Based on Electricity Consumption
Figure 5.2: Contribution of Carbon Dioxide Emissions (Metric Tons): China contributes more CO2 emissions than India and USA combined. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity consumption from fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables, 2021 (Our World In Data)
Figure 5.1: China contributes the most carbon dioxide, followed by USA and then India. USA generally contributes less carbon dioxide each year. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Sources: Electricity consumption from fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables, 2021 (Our World In Data), Carbon intensity of electricity, 2000 to 2021 (Our World in Data)
Figure 5.4: Amount of CO2 Emitted from 2020-2021 (Metric Tons): Together, all three countries emitted approximately 9.3 billion tons of CO2. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity consumption from fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables, 2021 (Our World In Data)
Figure 5.3: Amount of CO2 Released by Country (in billions of metric tons): China and India steadily contribute more CO2 annually, while USA contributes less. Data visualization by Samruddhi Tawade.
Data Source: Electricity consumption from fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables, 2021 (Our World In Data)
China, India, and the United States emitted around 9.3 billion tons of CO2 from 2020-2021 alone, according to figure 5.4. This accounted for 29% of the total CO2 emissions from 2015-2021.
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For our third question, we wanted to know by how much the global maximum temperature increased during the pandemic. Based on figure 6.1, we found out that the global surface temperature decreased by 0.32 degrees fahrenheit from 2020 to 2021, and also decreased from 2015-2021 with an average of 0.01% per year.
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According to figure 6.2, CO2 in the atmosphere is actually increasing by 2.5% every year and has increased by 2.27% from 2020 - 2021. This shows that there is a correlation between the electricity consumption and carbon dioxide in atmosphere because both results increased.
Temperature and Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
Figure 6.1: Annual Average Temperature from 2015-2021: 2020 has the highest global temperature, at just over 33.8 degrees fahrenheit. Data visualization by CJ Rebong.
Data Source: Land-Ocean Temperature Index (C)
