Carbon emissions from electricity generation, by country

This post lists the CO₂ emissions from electricity generation alone, rather than from total energy use, and presents the data on a country-by-country basis.

Glomfjord power plant, Norway. A 20MW hydroelectric plant built in 1918.	(M. Paavola)

This is yet another post featuring carbon emissions data. These posts have turned out to be surprisingly popular, despite their rather dry content. It looks like there’s a small unmet need for easy-to-find energy and emissions data on the internet.

I’ve looked at carbon emissions from the main electricity generating technologies in the post “Carbon emissions from electricity generation: the numbers”, and I’ve looked at total CO₂ emissions on a country-by-country basis in “Energy mix and carbon emissions, country by country”. The latter post looked at emissions from all sources, but it’s also worth repeating such a country-by-country emissions analysis for electricity generation alone, because electricity looks set to become a growing fraction of overall energy use. That trend is being driven from the demand and supply sides alike. From the supply end, many low carbon energy sources such as wind, solar photovoltaic, tidal, hydro and nuclear deliver energy as electricity. On the consumption side, low carbon transport, such as electric vehicles, will increase the demand for energy delivered as electricity. So it’s not just low carbon energy, but low carbon electricity in particular, that has to be looked at.

This post looks at emissions from electricity generation alone. I’ve opted to use a non-governmental data source for this post. There are two reasons for that.

Firstly, this particular data breakdown – carbon emissions from electricity alone – isn’t often presented in official government statistics, so a trawl through government publications would yield incomplete data and would be very laborious.

Secondly, I try to get a diverse range of sources for the data in these posts, for reasons explained previously. Since most energy data come from government and industry, I try to broaden out the mix by bringing in non-governmental, non-industry data sources when such sources exist. For this post, I’ve taken data from an emissions monitoring initiative called Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) ^[1].

What is CARMA?

CARMA maintains an electricity emissions database. It was set up by the Center for Global Development, which describes itself as an “independent, not-for-profit think tank that works to reduce global poverty and inequality by encouraging policy change in the U.S. and other rich countries through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community” ^[2]. Here’s what they say about CARMA:

Hundreds of millions of concerned global citizens can promote climate-friendly products and technologies as consumers, investors, shareholders, managers and workers. All they need to act is timely, accurate, publicly-available information about the choices they face. To meet this challenge, CGD launched a global, web-based initiative called Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) on November 14th, 2007 that promotes carbon emissions reduction using public disclosure techniques that have significantly reduced conventional pollution in both developed and developing countries.

Center for Global Development ^[3]

CARMA compiles and maintains a database of power stations and their carbon emissions:

At its core, Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) is a massive database containing information on the carbon emissions of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies worldwide. Power generation accounts for 40% of all carbon emissions in the United States and about one-quarter of global emissions. CARMA is the first global inventory of a major, emissions-producing sector of the economy.

About CARMA ^[1]

The Data

Table 1 below lists the 35 countries with the highest electrical energy generation in 2007, sorted in descending order of emissions per unit electrical energy generated. The table is based on data from CARMA (with units converted to metric). To keep the list short, I’ve shown only the top 35 electricity producing countries, but these 35 countries accounted for 90.1% of total world electrical energy generation, and 92.7% of total world CO₂ emissions from electricity generation in 2007, so this truncated list covers over 90% of both generation and emissions.

The data are for CO₂ emissions from plant operations alone. That is, they do not show total life cycle emissions, so nuclear and hydro count as having zero emissions in this analysis. The difference isn’t actually all that great, but total life cycle figures are more useful as a policy guide. See this post for total life cycle emissions from each major generating technology.

The table shows each country’s “carbon intensity” for electricity generation, where “carbon intensity” means the CO₂ emissions per unit of electrical energy generated. Unfortunately the terms “carbon intensity” and “emissions intensity” can have more than one meaning, so they need to be defined carefully every time they’re used. The terms are sometimes used to mean CO₂ emissions per unit GDP, and sometimes to mean CO₂ emissions per unit energy. Here, I’m using “carbon intensity” to mean CO₂ emissions per unit of generated electrical energy.

Table 1.  CO₂ emissions from electricity generation

Country	Electricity    generated (a)	CO2    emissions (b)	Energy mix (c)			Carbon   intensity (d)
	TWeh	million tons	fossil	hydro	nuclear	kg CO2/MWeh
Poland	163	163	96%	1%	0%	1002
South Africa	215	198	93%	0%	6%	920
Australia	228	203	90%	7%	0%	891
China	3260	2830	83%	15%	2%	868
India	719	579	76%	16%	2%	805
Czech Republic	78	58	65%	3%	30%	742
Indonesia	125	83	78%	9%	0%	662
Malaysia	95	59	86%	6%	0%	626
Germany	636	389	62%	3%	24%	612
United States	4190	2558	69%	7%	18%	611
Turkey	149	91	72%	27%	0%	609
Taiwan (China)	218	124	59%	4%	17%	570
Thailand	124	70	92%	5%	0%	563
United Kingdom	370	206	71%	1%	20%	557
Netherlands	101	55	78%	0%	4%	548
Spain	283	138	58%	7%	19%	487
Russia	896	434	63%	20%	16%	484
South Korea	392	174	44%	1%	35%	444
Italy	355	152	70%	9%	0%	429
Mexico	220	93	73%	13%	5%	421
Ukraine	172	67	44%	7%	48%	387
Saudi Arabia	167	64	99%	0%	0%	385
Egypt	101	38	87%	12%	0%	376
Japan	1030	376	33%	8%	28%	365
Iran	205	74	86%	10%	0%	363
Belgium	83	26	36%	0%	55%	317
Argentina	95	29	61%	30%	7%	307
Finland (e)	98	29	8%	4%	7%	295
Pakistan	87	23	53%	35%	3%	261
Canada	732	156	26%	50%	12%	213
Venezuela	101	11	24%	74%	0%	110
France	551	48	9%	9%	78%	88
Brazil	431	22	7%	83%	2%	50
Sweden	154	3	2%	47%	45%	17
Norway	139	1	1%	98%	0%	5
World Total	18830	10377	-	-	-	551
The data are taken from the CARMA database [4]. The methodology is described in Ref. [5]. The data are for the year 2007. The table shows the 35 countries with the highest electricity production in 2007. These 35 countries accounted for 90.1% of world electrical energy generation, and 92.7% of world CO2 emissions from electricity generation in 2007. The table is sorted in order of decreasing carbon intensity. The largest value in each column is highlighted. The emissions data are for electricity generation alone. The energy mix data are for electricity generation alone, not for total energy use. The data show emissions during operation, not for the whole life cycle of the generating plant. Notes: (a) The units of electrical energy generated are terawatt-hours. (b) The units of carbon dioxide emissions are millions of metric tons. (c) The fossil fuel fraction in the energy mix combines gas, oil, coal and lignite use. (d) The units of carbon intensity are kilograms of CO2 emitted per megawatt-hour of electricity generated.  (e) The data for Finland differ from Finnish industry data. The discrepancy is marked in the table.

What Does It All Mean?

I’ve highlighted the biggest number in each column of the table. Let’s look at the big two producers first. The two largest electricity producers, the U.S. and China, account for 39% of the world’s electricity output between them. The largest generator of electricity is the United States, but the largest emitter of CO₂ from electricity generation is China. China emits 42% more CO₂ per unit electricity than the U.S.

Bełchatów power station in Poland is Europe’s largest coal-fired power plant. It emits 31.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year – the second highest emissions of any power plant on earth.

Among the top thirty-five electricity producers, Poland has by far the highest emissions per unit of electricity generated. It is very heavily dependent on coal.

Saudi Arabia is all-fossil, but that’s mainly gas, which keeps its emissions down relative to the coal users (gas has lower emissions per unit energy than coal).

The four countries with the lowest emissions all make very heavy use of hydroelectric or nuclear power. Norway is 98% hydro, Sweden is 47% hydro and 45% nuclear, Brazil is 83% hydro and France is 78% nuclear.

The Netherlands’ carbon intensity is about equal to the world average, so every country above the Netherlands on this list emits more CO₂ per unit electricity than the world average. The U.K. is just above the world average.

How Good Are These Data?

The data show emissions from operations only, rather than over the entire life cycle of the power plant. That’s not a decisive difference, but total life cycle values would be more useful.

Are the numbers accurate? Well, I haven’t verified each value individually, but I have browsed over the figures to give them a “looks about right” check. The energy mix numbers look similar to the values from other sources, except for the energy mix numbers for Finland. Here are the Finnish Energy Industries numbers for 2007:

Last year, combined heat and power generation (CHP) covered 29 percent of electricity consumption, nuclear power 25 percent, hydropower 15 percent, and coal and other conventional condensing power 16 percent.

Finnish Energy Industries, 2008 ^[6]

The energy mix is broken down the same way as CARMA’s, so a direct comparison is possible, but the Finnish Energy Industries energy mix numbers for Finland are very different from CARMA’s. I’ve flagged up the discrepancy in the table, but I can’t get to the bottom of it here.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Mike Ashby for suggesting the topic for this post in this comment.

References

1. About CARMA, CARMA website, 2008
2. About CGD, Center for Global Development, 2008
3. Confronting Climate Change, Center for Global Development, 2008
4. CARMA data table by country, CARMA, 2008
5. Calculating CARMA: Global Estimation of CO2 Emissions from the Power Sector – Working Paper 145, D. Wheeler and K. Ummel, Center for Global Development, May 2008 (Webcite cache)
6. Energy Year 2007 – Electricity, Finnish Energy Industries press release, January 22, 2008

 < Edit Jan 12, 2009:  Add ref to Working Paper 145. >