Polluting Power Plants Can’t Escape the Eyes in the Sky

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- This week, the technology nonprofit WattTime announced that, thanks to a $1.7 million grant from Google.org, it will use satellite technology to measure air pollution from every large power plant in the world. This effort, which will combine data “from a variety of sensors operating at different wavelengths,” will also use artificial intelligence to analyze and calculate carbon emissions, according to David Roberts at Vox. The company plans to make these data available to the public.

That public aspect is very important because, as WattTime’s executive director Gavin McCormick rightly points out, “Far too many power companies currently shroud their pollution in secrecy.” It’s not just companies that shroud emissions in secrecy. Countries do as well, even if not deliberately. “Shockingly few countries, essentially only the U.S. and China,” actively disclose emissions from power plants in real time, as Lauri Myllyvirta of Greenpeace noted on Twitter. The European Union doesn’t, nor does Japan. And cheating on emissions reporting is rampant in many places, while some countries don’t require emissions measurements at the smokestack level at all.

WattTime’s initiative is potentially quite significant. A world with granular, real-time data on the most significant contributors to planet-warming emissions is one that can be better managed. That management could take many forms, too — including making companies and countries aware of things they’d like to clean up or make more efficient to naming and shaming those that don’t follow rules. Roberts lays out some of the benefits of WattTime’s plans for citizens, too, such as enabling them to put pressure on the biggest carbon emitters.

I’ll add two other thoughts.

The first is that there are plenty of possible market applications for this information. Precise data on plant emissions are also precise data on plants’ utilization rates and revenues, and it’s quite possibly data that will be available before companies disclose it in regulatory or financial filings. BloombergNEF’s U.S. power markets team, for instance, uses hourly data from Environmental Protection Agency continuous emission monitoring systems to calculate power generated by plants — but those data are only reported quarterly, and it’s spotty, too.

The second is that WattTime’s methods can probably be extended to other large emitters outside the power sector, in particular petrochemical facilities, which are already the subject of intense trader scrutiny. Global oil trading is a $40 trillion market, and one in which geolocation can offer clues to refinery operations.

It’s not hard to imagine energy and equity traders casting their eyes toward a new stream of data for some of the world’s biggest physical assets and doing their best to find an edge with it.

—With assistance from Nicholas Steckler

Weekend reading

• The United Nations secretary-general wants countries to build no new coal plants after next year.
• A $10 billion fund to cover the costs of California wildfires would probably last only through 2030.
• Washington Governor Jay Inslee is calling for a Climate Conservation Corps “that will help mobilize the American people to rise to the defining challenge of our time: climate change.”
• The Three Mile Island nuclear plant will close by Sept. 30.
• The U.K. Environment Agency is preparing for a 4-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures. That plan includes “potentially moving communities out of harm’s way in the longer term” if the scale of flooding or coastal change is sufficiently great.
• A deep dive of polling on U.K. attitudes on climate change finds that 80 percent of the public is “very or fairly concerned about climate change.”
• Australia’s property market “is expected to lose $571 billion in value by 2030 due to climate change and extreme weather.”
• Officials at two of Australia’s financial regulators say climate change is more than an ethical issue for Australian businesses; it’s a “legally foreseeable” risk.
• Australia’s pension funds are using their clout to push companies to act on environmental issues and climate change.
• Australia’s politics may be changing with its climate. How the issue of climate change plays in its national election on May 18 will be an important marker for other democracies.
• Princeton University is looking to break up the white male money monopoly running its $25.9 billion endowment.
• More than 10,000 people paid 1,000 euros each to be the first to own Volkswagen AG’s limited-edition ID.3, an electric hatchback.
• There are 5,000 electric vehicles in Poland today. Its prime minister wants there to be 1 million by 2025.
• The first patents for Dyson Ltd.’s electric car hint at a “long wheel base, an interior cabin with reclining seats and an aerodynamic design.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Nathaniel Bullard is a BloombergNEF energy analyst, covering technology and business model innovation and system-wide resource transitions.

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