Global Warming Program Reports

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Executive Summary

The United States relies heavily on outdated technology and limited resources for most of its electricity needs.  While the production of clean, renewable energy such as wind and solar power is growing, the vast majority of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—and from nuclear power. 

Our long-time dependence on fossil fuels is a threat to our future.  It wreaks havoc on our environment by polluting our air, land, and water; and, it puts our entire economy at risk due to our reliance on imports from unfriendly parts of the world.  Most importantly it fuels global warming—the most profound environmental problem of our time; whose ever growing impacts will impose threats to our safety and immense financial cost on our society.  Power plants are the single largest source of U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the main pollutant that fuels global warming.

Coal is the biggest culprit.  Coal supplies just under half of America’s electricity—more than any other source—and is the dirtiest of all fuels.  Coal has the highest carbon content of any fossil fuel per unit of energy, meaning that burning coal for electricity produces more carbon per kilowatt-hour generated than does burning oil or natural gas, the second and third biggest sources of global warming pollution from electricity generation, respectively.  America’s fleet of coal-fired power plants emitted more than 80 percent of CO2 pollution from U.S. power plants in 2007 and 36 percent of the total U.S. CO2 pollution, as well as disproportionate amounts of smog- and soot-forming pollutants, toxic mercury, and other toxic air pollutants [1].

This report examines the relationships between the age and CO2 emissions of America's power plants.  We analyze 2007 plant-by-plant data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Acid Rain Program; 2007 is the most recent year for which final data is available.  The report finds that America's power is both old and dirty – and that these two qualities tend to go hand-in-hand.  Key findings include the following for 2007:

America's power is old:

1) Two-thirds of fossil-fuel electricity was generated by plants built before 1980.  We are reliant on plants more than 30 years old for the majority of our electricity.

2) The oldest plants in the nation – which have been in operation for a long as 70 years – are located in Indiana, Wisconsin, New York, Iowa, and North Carolina.  These dinosaur plants were built in the same decade that the television first became commercially available.

America's power is dirty:

1) In 2007, power plants released 2.56 billion tons of CO2, the amount produced by XX [number of] cars.  This represents 42 percent of the total U.S. CO2 emissions in 2007.[2]

2) The dirtiest 10 percent of power plants produced more than half of CO2 emissions from power plants.  Most of the pollution from our electricity sector can be attributed to a small subset of power plants.

3) Texas, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, and Pennsylvania emit the most CO2 pollution from power plants.  Texas power plants emitted nearly twice the amount of CO2 than power plants in Ohio and Florida, the next highest polluting states.

The oldest and dirtiest often go hand-in-hand:

• The oldest power plants are dirty.  Plants built before 1980 produced 73 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions from power plants in 2007.  These represent half of all plants, indicating that the older half of plants pollute a disproportionate amount.

• The dirtiest power plants are old.  Of plants that produced more than five million tons of CO2 pollution in 2007, 83 percent were built before 1980.  This subset of 129 plants, just 10 percent of plants—the oldest of the dirtiest—generated almost half of our electricity and produced half of the CO2 emissions from power plants in 2007.

Implications for Policy:

Cleaning up America's fleet of aging, inefficient power plants is critical to stop global warming.  With power plants responsible for 42 percent of America’s CO2 emissions[3], we cannot achieve the real and sustained reductions in global warming pollution that science shows are urgently needed to stop the worst effects of global warming unless we begin now to reduce carbon pollution from the utility sector.

The most recent report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in 2007, found that in order to have a 50/50 chance of avoiding dangerous global warming, developing nations as a whole should reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050.  Cutting pollution from the oldest and dirtiest power plants is a key step in reducing our overall pollution to the levels dictated by the most recent science.

The United States cannot build a clean energy economy without cleaning up power plants. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that electricity demand will remain relatively flat over the next two decades, growing at an annual average rate of less than 1 percent – and that’s without factoring in the enormous efficiency gains that we can and should make.  These projections make it clear that if we allow polluting fossil fuels to continue to dominate America's electricity market, there will be little to no need for clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power, which could also help jump-start our economy, create millions of clean energy jobs, and reduce air and water pollution.

In order to build a clean energy economy and stop global warming, lawmakers should adopt the following recommendations:

• The Environmental Protection Agency should implement the Clean Air Act to finally require power plants to meet modern pollution standards for carbon.

• Congress should pass strong clean energy and global warming legislation that caps global warming pollution at science-based levels, establishes strong mandates for clean energy production, and does not weaken the ability of the Clean Air Act to require power plants to clean up.

• Congress should eliminate subsidies that help keep our nation dependent on fossil fuels.