The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has released provisional data on UK CO2 emissions for 2009 along with a discussion of the results.
The numbers and are in million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) and are broken down by source, which means that they do not allocate electricity consumption to the end user.
The figure for the residential sector is therefore just for emissions from burning fossil fuels in the home for space heating, hot water and cooking. We’ll have to wait until this time next year to see the end user emissions data (just published for 2008).
The results from the biggest sectors are quite striking to say the least:
Energy Supply: 186.2MtCO2 (-11.3%)
Business: 72.4MtCO2 (-15.3%)
Transport: 121.8MtCO2 (-6.5%)
Residential: 76.7MtCO2 (-5.0%)
Industrial Process: 11.1MtCO2 (-19.0%)
Total: 480.9MtCO2 (-9.7%)
The impact of the recession is clear to see in all areas.
Emissions from electricity generation dropped by 13% to 150.5MtCO2 as demand dropped and coal generation was replaced by nuclear generation coming back on stream after extensive downtime for maintenance.
The 5% reduction in emissions from heating our homes is good to see. This was in spite of the winter of 2008 seeing mean temperatures of 4.9°C, considerably warmer than the winter of 2009 which saw mean temperatures of 3.2°C.
The question is how do we continue this downward trajectory in emissions as the economy starts to recover?
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