Where are the dirtiest power plants?

All morning, I've been playing with a site called http://www.carma.org. CARMA stands for Carma Monitoring for Action which is an organization financed by a couple of thinktanks in Washington DC.

What they've done is compiled a comprehensive database of power plants across the world including the megawatts of power that they product, and the carbon emissions of that plant. Then they mashed up the data with Google Maps.

The result is something that's endlessly interesting to play with to get a better feeling for how and where power is generated across the world. For example, to start with I typed in my zip code in their search box. Puget Sound Energy immediately came up, and I was able to get a complete picture of their power mix. My power mix.

Generally, green dots mean that the installation is a hydroelectric plant, but every so often it's a wind farm. Red dots are usually big, bad coal plants.

The data can be sliced any number of ways. You can look up the most polluting plants in the US or admire how many clean plants there are in Europe. Or get data on how the carbon for a power plant has gone up or down over time. In some cases, you can even get a look into power companies' future power goals.

It's a very rich resource. I strongly recommend you spend a little time with it to better understand your power mix.

Comments

[Adrian]

Hey just stopping by to get my dose of green info. Always good stuff here! I am trying to compile a list of stuff I can do to reduce my carbon emissions. MTV had a commercial about it, and got me interested. I have been to www.earthlab.com and they have a ton of tips but I was mostly impressed by their page where they have their users send in tips: http://www.earthlab.com/life/tips.aspx Does anyone else know of other data bases that I can find these types of small things that lower my emissions? EPA or WWF maybe?

Thanks for all your info and drop me a link if you guys see anything worth my time.

[Oscar]

The CARMA site now provides a number of widgets that people can embed on social network sites to help raise awareness, encourage interaction, and spread the data - http://carma.org/widgets/. Finally, all the data is freely available and can also be re-used on other web applications via our API - http://carma.org/api/