Eye in the Sky: Identifying Plants from Above
By providing detailed estimates of carbon pollution facility by facility, CARMA provides the world’s most comprehensive inventory of power sector emissions. It also happens to be the world’s best place for power plant voyeurism.
As part of CARMA’s development, we collected the geographic coordinates of more than 30,000 power plants representing 89% of global emissions and 84% of all power production. In most of those cases, we identified the coordinates of the city where the plant is located. These coordinates are fed into Google Maps and displayed on CARMA.org as icons. If you zoom in on those icons, you can often obtain a nice bird’s eye view of the plants without too much trouble. My favorites so far:
The Scherer Plant outside of Juliette, Georgia — the highest emitting plant in the U.S. — complete with visible train trestle and tracks that allow for uninterrupted unloading of at least three coal trains a day.
The plant on Lamma Island, Hong Kong set against some beautiful (and warming and acidifying) tropical waters.
And finally, the wonderfully photographed Ferrybridge Plant in the UK — complete with suburbs just 200 meters to the south.
I’ve only stumbled upon a few of these instances, but I image there are thousands more. I’m sure the CARMA user community will find the rest. And when you do, note it as a Reaction on the plant’s page. CARMA contains information for more than 190,000 cities worldwide, so type in your hometown and see if you can locate a Big Chuffer nearby.
Excellent research and information, I will be telling others of this new website.
I found the national trends for nuclear and Hydro-electric power generation particularly interesting, and how easy it was to interact with the maps. Top marks for the work you have done here.