又到了夏天，一个电费攀升的季节。空调是一个耗电大户，当整个城市或地区同时开空调时，电力公司必须以某种方式满足增加的用电需求。
“这往往是我们打开最老的工厂或者较‘脏’的发电厂的时候。”美国威斯康星大学（University of Wisconsin）的大气科学家特蕾西霍洛韦（Tracey Holloway）说，“其中一些只使用燃油或煤的老式工厂只在最热的日子里运行。”霍洛韦团队利用美国环境保护局（EPA）的数据，研究了气温上升时空气污染物的变化。他们发现，在美国东部地区，温度每上升1摄氏度，发电厂就会多排放14万吨二氧化碳。而且，整个地区的平均温度每上升1度……[查看全文]
Pollution Peaks When Temperatures Top Out
You may have noticed your summertime electricity bills, when you're cranking the A–C, are more pricey than your wintertime payments. That's because air-conditioning is an electricity hog. And when a whole city or region turns down the thermostat, utilities have to meet that increased demand somehow."This is often when we turn on the oldest plants or the dirtier power plants." Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "Some of these older plants that only run on fuel oil or run on coal only run on the hottest days."Using data from the EPA, Holloway and her team studied how air pollutants respond when the temperature goes up. They found that across the eastern U.S., for every degree Celsius temperature rise, power plants belched out 140,000 metric tons of additional carbon dioxide. And...[full transcript]
Abel, D. et al. (2017) ‘Response of power plant emissions to ambient temperature in the eastern United States’, Environmental Science & Technology, 51(10), pp. 5838–5846.
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b06201
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