Wind, Nuclear and Playing with Cars

This caused a mathematical synapse to fire:

Wind energy reduced power sector emissions by more than 5 percent last year, saving the same amount of CO2 as taking 20 million cars off the road, according to a new report.

Well, if you don’t mind your car sputtering to a stop when the wind stops blowing. Okay, that’s not really fair. It’s a question of how many carbon emissions were displaced by wind power and that was 126.8 million tons or the equivalent of about 20 million cars. That’s fair – but consider:

Nuclear energy facilities avoided nearly 590 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2013 across the U.S. This is nearly as much carbon dioxide as is released from 113 million cars, which is more than all U.S. passenger cars. The U.S. produces more than five billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

That 113 million car figure seems right enough, but is that (or less, actually) really the number of passengers vehicles in the car crazy U.S? Seems too few.

Ace NEI statistician David Bradish said a fair number of things are excluded, including trucks, buses and other conveyances which might carry different emissions standards and outputs. So this works for that purpose. And impressive, too – we could probably scoop Canada’s cars into the emission-displaced hopper, too, especially if you counted the country’s six reactors.

We’re making fun, but really, good for the wind folks. It is a milestone, wind is emission free and it’s all to the good. The only conclusion to reach is that since nuclear energy has gotten all the cars off the road, let’s let wind have the flatbed trucks.

AWEA’s report is here.

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NEI Nuclear Notes

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