How much CO2 am I producing?

Regardless of if you believe in Climate Change or not, there is one thing for certain. The generation of electricity has a CO2 output one way or another. If it is not during the generation by burning coal, it is through the manufacturing process for the silicon cells, or for the wind turbine.

So, how do you find out how much CO2 you are producing? After all, it is printed on your electricity bill, isn’t it?

Well, yes, but no. You see, things are not that simple. The amount of CO2 produced for every kWh of electricity is constantly varying, depending on a lot of factors. So much so that the government releases figures for their estimates every three months, and final figures every year. Unfortunately, there is always a delay in getting these figures out. If everything lines up, they will send you your electricity bill as soon as they have worked out the latest figures, and everything is good. In practice things do not work that way.

In some states here in Australia, the figures change every year. Unfortunately, this fact is forgotten by the billing departments commonly who know all about dollars but not Kg of CO2. I had one electricity bill where the figure they used was more than three years out of date. Thankfully the numbers were still within a few percentage points, but you expect to be able to rely on everything that people send you on a bill.

Unfortunately not even the Government can get things right. The federal government sent people to homes to do energy audits as part of a program they called ‘Green Loans’ and produced a report of somewhat dubious value, suggesting areas where energy and water use could be reduced. The problem was, at least for my report that the software was written in Victoria, and I live in NSW. So when my report came out, they had used old figures from Victoria for CO2 savings, which were at least 20% higher than could be achieved in NSW given the same assumptions.