I contacted Chelan County PUD ( CCPUD) to get resolution on a question that has existed ( at least for me) since we began our CCNCW quest some four years ago. YES– if you get your power from Chelan County PUD, you can reduce fossil fuel power generation carbon outputs by reducing your use. Read below for details. I also asked about calculating my electricity carbon budget. Douglas County does not have fossil fuels in their fuel mix, only hydro power, so all of their power is mostly carbon free, but no power production is totally free of carbon. I am surprised that the average household carbon for CCPUD is 19 metric tons/year. When you consider that the global individual budget to not exceed 1.5 C increase in average global temperatures is 5 tons total/year at this time, so your carbon budget may be blown before you drive your car, eat and everything else we do. The carbon budget needs to eventually decline to a daunting 2 metric tons /person/year, but with more renewables, conservation, technological advances and yes, sacrifice, we can hopefully will get there.
Perhaps, the work has been done to compare the carbon and others advantage of electric cars by PUD ? I can do it, but if it is out there point me to it. I can completely charge my electric car for 69 cents with Douglas PUD.
I really appreciate CCPUD taking the time to answer questions. Thank you to CCPUD, Susan Gillin and Jim White.
Hello Kevin,
Below is a table of our fuel disclosure amounts.
Although we get 98.6% of our electricity from hydro, I think to truly be able to calculate your carbon footprint you need to look at what emissions are affected by your consumption of energy at your home. While Chelan PUD does have some carbon emissions from our line trucks and PUD vehicles, these emissions are not affected by what you use at your home. Our hydro facilities do not emit carbon. There was some controversial claims years ago that hydroelectric dams emitted large amounts of CO2, but these claims were based on a dam in Brazil that was going inundate large amounts of rain forest that would decay underwater and stop that section from absorbing any more CO2 in the future. Our dams did not inundate large areas of carbon capturing growth, and in fact provide irrigation for crops that consume CO2, some of which ends up stored as carbon in the soils.
Because Chelan PUD sells its excess power into the power grid that serves the entire west coast, the output of our hydro generation does not vary in response to the amount of electricity you consume at your house. To determine the amount of carbon emitted from your consumption of electricity at your home we need to look at the generation mix of the Western United States power grid. Specifically, we need to look at the types of generation that are needed to meet incremental increases or decreases in loads. Because their fuel costs are so low, renewable resources such as hydro, wind and solar, and nuclear plants, tend to run regardless of the demand for electricity. Natural gas and coal fired plants generally run to make up the difference. It used to be that coal plants generally ran to meet baseload energy consumption at night, and natural gas turbines ran mainly during the day to meet daytime peaks. So when you conserve power at night, you don’t change the output of our carbon free dams, but some coal plant somewhere had to back off slightly. Similarly during the day, when you conserve energy some natural gas turbine in the Western U.S. has to back off in response.
It took a while to find the CO2 emissions per kWh for the different fuel sources, but I found a 2016 DOE paper that had the information I was looking for.
I could not find your electricity usage in Chelan county to do the actual number of kWh consumed by your house, but using the average household consumption of 22,000 kWh per year, the average home in Chelan County contributes about 19 tons of CO2 per year to the atmosphere. Even though we are nearly 100% clean renewable hydro, reducing the amount of energy we consume will reduce our nation’s overall CO2 emissions.
Hope this helps,
Jim White, P.E.
Senior Energy Efficiency Engineer
Public Utility District No. 1 of Chelan County
327 N. Wenatchee Ave.
Wenatchee, Washington 98801
509-661-4829 (Office)
509-741-7466 (Cell)
509-661-8133 (Fax)
james.white@chelanpud.org