For the time being, there will be no change to the data on the site, which remains unchanged from the CARMA 2.0 release in August, 2008. Our hope is to make the upgraded database public within six months.

Check back with the CARMA blog for updates as the new database comes together.

CGD decided to focus on the power sector because it accounts for the most CO2 emissions (26%), and because it’s better-documented any other CO2-emitting sector. With that being said, it was no cakewalk to process emissions data from numerous sources, and we recognize that our findings are still far from perfect.

CARMA began with plant-level CO2 emissions publicly disclosed online by the US, EU, Canada, and India. This initial data source was combined with two others: the World Electric Power Plants Database (WEPP, a subscription service), and country-level power production data from the US Energy Information Agency. A fuzzy-logic algorithm, suggested by CGD colleague David Roodman, was used to stitch together the data sources by matching the (frequently inconsistent) identifier codes. The fuzzy-logic algorithm, along with a painstaking visual analysis, formed the basis for our project.

CARMA ended up with 51,373 total power facilities. Of those plants, 26,034 emit no CO2, and 2,922 have publicly-reported CO2 emissions. The CO2 for the remaining 22,417 plants are estimates based on a regression analysis of 2,469 CO2-emitting facilities in the US. As for power production, the public data sources account for 4,071 facilities (3,869 in the US, 202 in India). The power production for the remaining 47,302 plants are estimates based on the following 5-step process:

1. Estimate capacity factors using a regression analysis based on US facilities
2. Multiply estimated capacity factors by WEPP-reported operational plant capacities
3. Combine estimated and reported power to obtain total power production by energy source for each country
4. For each energy source, divide the total by the corresponding total from the US Energy Information Agency to obtain an adjustment factor
5. For each country and energy source, multiply each estimated power output by the relevant adjustment factor (if the power output isn’t publicly-reported)

A plant’s power production in megawatt-hours (MWh) is the product of its capacity factor (% of potential capacity actually used), its capacity (MW), and its potential operating hours per year (usually 24 * 365 = 8,760). Emissions intensity for each plant is calculated by dividing CO2 emissions by power production.

CARMA uses regression models fitted to plant-level variables in a large US dataset. We estimate emissions and power capacity for plants from very detailed information about their capacity, generator age, combustion technology, and energy sources. CARMA’s plant-level emissions and power reports are long-run average estimates based on facilities under standard operating conditions and with similar variables to plants in the US dataset.

To attach geographic coordinates to plants, Kevin and David sifted through several sources, including the US EPA’s eGRID database, MaxMind’s World Cities database, and various European public disclosure databases. CARMA’s goal was not to provide precise geographic coordinates for local mapping, but to allow for regional- and global-scale mapping to reveal broad patterns in the spatial distribution of plants. Another fuzzy-logic algorithm was used to match city names from the WEPP database to the MaxMind cities database. All said and done, about 60% of all plants in CARMA have coordinates. As it states in the working paper, “the geographic totals in CARMA do not measure emissions related to the consumption of people within a region; they simply measure emissions produced by power plants physically located within that region”.

Data – Carbon Footprint

AMME, the Avoid Mass Extinctions Engine, provides a common standard for calculating carbon footprint. Data are available via an API. These calculations are tied to a profile, which could be an individual, an organization, or another entity. It’s another REST API and returns data in HTML, XML, or JSON. Access to the API requires credentials, and the idea is to provide data about the carbon footprint of nearly any product, such as an appliance, or activity, like an airplane trip. It’d be interesting to see how average domestic electrical use correlates with power plant emissions. A mashup might use AMEE to get representative home’s electricity usage for a country and compare that to the CO₂ output and Intensity from CARMA.

Data – Environmental Protection Agency

The United Stated Environmental Protection Agency provides an envirofacts database, which could be really compelling if displayed next to CARMA data, particularly mapped power plants, for a US zip code, city, or county. The EPA maps show points where pollutions was discharged to water, Superfund sites, hazardous waste, and more. You can see a sample map for the latest Geospatial Data files. The zip file contains a single 169 MB file. That’s better than nothing, but you will have to parse the file and transform it into data you can query by state, zip code, etc. FindPollution makes use of EPA data for displaying pollution by US Zip code. Planet Hazard also maps EPA’s National Emission Inventory of hazardous air pollutants.  But neither of them republish the data.

Data – CAIT

Protected behind a login and password, the World Resources Institute has a Climate Analysis Indicators Tool. You can get some data, but as posted in their Forum, “We have actually purposely set up CAIT to not allow users to download large amounts of data at a time (e.g., by sector, or year). This is due to our data-sharing agreement with the International Energy Agency, one of CAIT’s principal sources for CO₂ data.” A quick look at the IAE’s data page shows that getting data from them is not so easy or available for free. Still, if you are willing to register and parse the CSV files , you could do some interesting analyses. For example, one could calculate and compare what fraction of a country’s total CO₂ emission come from its power sector. Similarly, one could compare CAIT’s calculations of Intensity (in gCO₂/kWh) per country to CARMA’s intensity data for Power Plants.

Tools – DIY Map

DIY Map is a very easy to use flash mapping application that reads data from a specially crafted XML file.  It can present data as points on a map or by filling a country or state with different colors.  CARMA data could be presented by coloring countries based on their CO₂ emissions.  Users could then click around various regions and countries to explore the data further.  Transforming CARMA data to display on a world map wouldn’t be very difficult, the only challenge is in matching Country data to the FIPS country codes DIY Map uses to identify countries.

Tools – XML/SWF Charts

Another way to present data is through traditional graphs and charts, and there are many solutions available for building graphs from data.  One free option is XML/SWF Charts, which takes an XML data file describing a chart and its data to draw and animate slick flash charts.  Besides the usual regional/country/state comparisons, one could plot the CO₂ emission, electricity generated, and intensity for a set of plants.  Such a chart could provide another perspective for comparing the environmental impact of a group of plants.

So, to make CARMA’s API even easier, we’re pleased to provide a PHP5 CARMA client that takes care of the low-level details and lets you focus on creating a cool widget or mash up with CARMA’s data.

Requirements

The Carma PHP Client requires PHP5. It makes use of PHP’s native streams functionality to fetch data from the CARMA site. If you have the JSON extension, behind the scenes it will decode returned data, otherwise it falls back to using SimpleXML to parse XML data.

Download the Client

Download the PHP source code for the CARMA client here. You may need to right click and select “Save as..” from your browser’s context menu.

Basic Usage

I’ve tried to make the client as simple to use as possible, leaving the implementation details out of the way. After you download it, simply include it in your script and you’re ready to go. Here is a simple example for retrieving data for a plant whose ID we already know:

include('CarmaClient.php')$carma = new CarmaClient();$plant = $carma->getPlant(25097);// will display "LEWISTON MILL" and its dataecho $plant->name . " is operated by " . $plant->company->name . '';   

echo "<br />Current carbon output: " . number_format($plant->carbon->present, 2)';   

echo "<br />Future carbon output: " . number_format($plant->carbon->future, 2) ;

If you know the ID of a company in CARMA’s database, you can fetch the details for the company with one call. Continuing our example:

$company = $carma->getCompany(array("id" => $plant->company->id));

The searchPlants, searchCompanies, and searchLocations commands query the CARMA database in useful and revealing ways. These methods are available through the php client and will return an array of php objects. Let’s say we want to produce a list of companies in the state of Virginia in the USA. This is a two-step query; we need to figure out the locaiton ID for the state of Virginia, and then we can find the companies associated with that location.

First, we need to find the location ID of the state of Virginia:

$locations = $carma->searchLocations(array('name' => 'Virginia', 'type' => '3'));// carma api returns ANY location with the word Virginia in it so we have to filter the resultsforeach ($location as $loc) {   

    if ('Virginia' == $loc->name)   

    {   

        $va = $loc;   

    }   

}

Now we can find all the plants located in Virginia and list them:

$plants = $carma->searchPlants(array('location' => $va->id));echo "<p>There are " . $va->plant_count . " plants in Virginia.  They are: </p><ul>";foreach ($plants as $plant)   

{   

    echo "<li>" . $plant->name .' -Future Carbon Output: ' . number_format($plant->carbon->future) ." tons </li>"   

}echo "</ul>"

CARMA’s data has infinite applications, as my colleague Matt Gibbs noted in an earlier post, and now it’s easier than ever to start creating great projects of your own. If you want to play with the CARMA API and have PHP available, please download the Carma Client and let us know how you are using it.