Suchergebnisse

In order to maintain the 2°C climate change target, global carbon intensity of electricity generation needs to achieve a short-term target of 600 g/kWh by 2020. This target is important for China, which has been the largest consumer and producer of electricity since 2011. China has set ambitious targets to reduce its electricity carbon intensity in the 13th five-year plan. For a country as large as China, the outcomes of these policies rely on the implementation strategies and effectiveness of each province. In this study, we estimate the carbon intensities of power generation in China's provinces by 2020. Results show that despite progress in renewable energy growth most provinces are expected to have carbon intensities well above 600 g/kWh by 2020. Renewable energy sources can help reduce carbon intensities in most provinces, but the magnitude of such impacts depends on the coordination among provinces. The over-dependence on coal power generation has made carbon capture and storage a necessity for China's provinces to reduce their carbon intensity for power generation. Therefore, government support should be addressed sooner rather than later.

Abstract. There is a growing interest to characterize fire plumes in order to control air quality during wildfire episodes and to estimate the carbon and ozone balance of fire emissions. A numerical approach has been used to study the mechanisms of NO formation at the source level in wildfires given that NO plays an important role in the formation of ground-level ozone. The major reaction mechanisms involved in NO chemistry have been identified using reaction path analysis. Accordingly, a two-step global kinetic scheme in the gas phase has been proposed herein to account for the volatile fuel-bound nitrogen (fuel-N) conversion to NO, considering that the volatile fraction of fuel-N is released as NH3. Data from simulations using the perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) code from CHEMKIN-II package with a detailed kinetic mechanism (GDF-Kin® 3.0) have been used to calibrate and evaluate the global model under typical wildfire conditions in terms of the composition of the degradation gases of vegetation, the equivalence ratio, the range of temperatures and the residence time.

With the implementation of China's top-down CO 2 emissions reduction strategy, the regional differences should be considered. As the most basic governmental unit in China, counties could better capture the regional heterogeneity than provinces and prefecture-level city, and county-level CO 2 emissions could be used for the development of strategic policies tailored to local conditions. However, most of the previous accounts of CO 2 emissions in China have only focused on the national, provincial, or city levels, owing to limited methods and smaller-scale data. In this study, a particle swarm optimization-back propagation (PSO-BP) algorithm was employed to unify the scale of DMSP/OLS and NPP/VIIRS satellite imagery and estimate the CO 2 emissions in 2,735 Chinese counties during 1997–2017. Moreover, as vegetation has a significant ability to sequester and reduce CO 2 emissions, we calculated the county-level carbon sequestration value of terrestrial vegetation. The results presented here can contribute to existing data gaps and enable the development of strategies to reduce CO 2 emissions in China.

Most environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) theories do not apply to carbon dioxide (CO2 )—an unregulated, invisible, odorless gas with no direct human health effects. This analysis addresses the hypothesis that the income-CO2 relationship reflects changes in the composition of an economy as it develops and the associated role of trade in an emissions-intensive good (e.g., electricity). To test this hypothesis, I use a novel data set of 1960 to 1999 state-level CO2 emissions to estimate pretrade (production-based) CO2 EKCs and posttrade (consumption-based) CO2 EKCs. Based on the first EKC analysis of CO2 emissions in the United States, I find that consumption-based EKCs peak at significantly higher incomes than production-based EKCs, suggesting that emissions-intensive trade drives, at least in part, the income-emissions relationship. I have also investigated the robustness of the estimated income-CO2 relationship through a variety of specifications. Estimated EKCs appear to vary by state, and the estimated income-emissions relationships could be spurious for some states with nonstationary income and emissions data. Finally, I find that cold winters, warm summers, and historic coal endowments are positively associated with states' CO2 emissions.

AbstractDrained agricultural peatlands emit significantly higher amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per hectare than mineral soils. GHG abatement costs for representative cereals (CF) and dairy (DF) farms in southwestern Finland were estimated by integrating an emission-based tax together with an option to invest in a subsidized adjustable drainage system on peat soils in a farm-level dynamic optimization model. With an average 10% share of peat soils from overall farm area, emissions tax rates over 15 (CF) and 19 (DF) €/tCO2e triggered adjustable drainage investments with a significant reduction in GHG emissions per ha, when assuming no crop-yield effect from the adjustable drainage. Abatement costs for emissions tax rates €12–50/tCO2e/ha were €16–44/tCO2e (CF) and €26–51/tCO2e (DF) for whole farm-soil emissions, depending on the share of peatlands on the farm, on the yield effects of adjustable drainage, and on crop prices. High emissions tax rates imply higher abatement costs since farms have a limited capability to adjust their production and land use. Thus, emissions reductions from peatlands can be achieved at reasonable costs when investing in adjustable drainage on peatlands. The income losses due to emissions tax, however, are high, but they can be compensated for farmers by lumpsum payments independent of their production decisions. Since existing agricultural policies such as the EU CAP system may have limited effectiveness on GHG emissions, the emissions tax and adjustable drainage on peatlands could promote GHG abatement significantly on farms and areas with abundant peatlands.

Drained agricultural peatlands emit significantly higher amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per hectare than mineral soils. GHG abatement costs for representative cereals (CF) and dairy (DF) farms in southwestern Finland were estimated by integrating an emission-based tax together with an option to invest in a subsidized adjustable drainage system on peat soils in a farm-level dynamic optimization model. With an average 10% share of peat soils from overall farm area, emissions tax rates over 15 (CF) and 19 (DF) €/tCO(2)e triggered adjustable drainage investments with a significant reduction in GHG emissions per ha, when assuming no crop-yield effect from the adjustable drainage. Abatement costs for emissions tax rates €12–50/tCO(2)e/ha were €16–44/tCO(2)e (CF) and €26–51/tCO(2)e (DF) for whole farm-soil emissions, depending on the share of peatlands on the farm, on the yield effects of adjustable drainage, and on crop prices. High emissions tax rates imply higher abatement costs since farms have a limited capability to adjust their production and land use. Thus, emissions reductions from peatlands can be achieved at reasonable costs when investing in adjustable drainage on peatlands. The income losses due to emissions tax, however, are high, but they can be compensated for farmers by lumpsum payments independent of their production decisions. Since existing agricultural policies such as the EU CAP system may have limited effectiveness on GHG emissions, the emissions tax and adjustable drainage on peatlands could promote GHG abatement significantly on farms and areas with abundant peatlands.

The effort to reduce carbon emissions as the arguably most prevalent cause of global warming has been a positive trend in most African countries. One of the most successful strategies towards reaching that goal is the shift from fossil fuel power generation to renewable sources of energy such as wind, hydro, geothermal and solar. As Kenya sits on the equator it enjoys an all year round insolation between 5 and 6 kW/m2/day which is more than double of the average insulation in Germany, a country where solar energy is widely used. Taking advantage of a green line of financial support created by the French Government, Strathmore University embarked in a project to install a 600 kW roof-top, grid connected solar PV system to cater for its electricity needs. Having as a background of the newly instituted Feed-in-Tariff regulation, the system is designed to produce more than the required self-consumption such that the extra power can be sold to the utility via a PPA (power purchase agreement) and the revenue used to pay for the electricity used by the university at night. This paper describes the whole process from the technical, regulatory, educational and financial aspect highlighting the positive and negative events along the path such that it can be useful for other private sector institutions interested in greening their sources of energy, invest in renewable energy and thus reduce their operation costs. The authors have written this work having in mind not only countries in Africa but all other countries which sit in the so called "solar belt".

A set of existing optimization models, which represent the energy systems of the OECD and LDCs (less developed countries excluding centrally planned economies) with a time horizon to 2020, has been applied to derive first-order estimates of the techno-economic potential for emission reduction. The driving force for the introduction of reduction measures is a scheme of taxes levied on the emission of six pollutants, including the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane. The tax levels introduced are based on taxes discussed by the Swedish government: they are the break-even point to test which measures are cost effective and which emission levels can be reached at these costs. The regional models include the following alternatives: (i) reduction of final energy demand by supplying the requested services by other means (i.e., conservation); (ii) substitution of new fuels for polluting fuels; (iii) introduction of clean technologies for the same purposes; (iv) additions of pollution-reduction technologies. Alternative scenarios with emission taxes are compared with a base scenario without taxes related to pollutant emissions. The results indicate that an increase in CO2 emissions in the OECD and LDC regions of 47% over the next 30 yr in the base scenario would be changed to stable levels to 2010 by tax-induced measures. Thereafter, energy-consumption growth in the LDCs reverses this trend.