Today I came across Gridwatch. This is an interesting web app that provides a live monitoring of Ontario’s current electrical production and consumption.
As the screen capture shows, we have a heat warning today. This situation is currently being shared by UK and Europe, where they are experiencing temperature in excess of 40ºC, clearly much worse than we have it here.
The hype of these high temperatures in the media caused me to wonder what is our current electrical consumption?
Which lead me to do a quick search on Google, and resulted in me finding the Gridwatch web app, and its home page:
Aside from how much electricity we are using, the most interesting part is the CO2e number which is currently at 81g/kWh. Since my solar installation, I have generated 6,450 kWh of electricity through the use of my solar panels from April 12 to today. Do some simple math, this means I have prevented 522 kg (~1/2 tonne) of CO2 emissions.
In a previous post, I mentioned that an average person in Canada uses around 14.2 tons of CO2 per year. From this perspective, we are just placing a dent on our overall CO2 footprint. However in this Reuters article, it claims that we have to remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2. If we do some rough math, the average per capita onus is (1 billion tonnes / 7 billion people) = 143 kg. Given our household is 4 people, we have an obligation to remove 572 kg of CO2 to meet the goal of 1 billion tonnes of CO2 worldwide removal.
I say we are pretty close! Okay, we can obviously do more and we will.