Electric Throat Share

For the last few weeks I have been working on my portfolio site as I update things. (Note to self, do not wait another 15 years before embarking upon such an update.)

At the University of the Arts (requiescat in pace), I took an information design class wherein I spent a semester learning about the electricity generation market in the Philadelphia region. This became a key part of my portfolio when I applied for 99 jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession, had 3 interviews, and only 1 job offer.

That job offer lead me to Chicago and Euromonitor International where one of the first projects I worked on was a datagraphic about throat share, i.e. what drinks products/brands people in different countries drank. Essentially, I took what I learned about visualising the share of electricity generation in Pennsylvania to the share of drinks consumption across the world. Thus a career was born. Fast forward 15 years and I wanted to see how that electricity generation had changed. And I can do that because I used a public source in the US Energy Information Administration.

Anecdotally, Pennsylvanians know fracking for natural gas has been a boon to the former coal and steel parts of the Commonwealth, which really is a lifeline. But overall, Pennsylvania has long been known as a nuclear power state. More on that from a personal standpoint in a later post. Back in the uphill both ways to university day, I did not look at the United States overall. But now I can.

Largely this fits with the narratives I know. Coal has plummeted both in the Commonwealth and more broadly as natural gas has largely taken its place. No, that’s not great from a climate change perspective, but natural gas is definitely better than coal.

Renewables, nationally speaking, are now about 20% or 1/5th our net electricity generation. But in Pennsylvania, whilst this Monday morning might be a bright and blue sky day great for solar power, the nights are getting longer and we get a lot of clouds. We do have some hydroelectric dams—it helps to be a partially mountainous state. And, yes, we do have the wind farms along the Allegheny Ridge, one of the windiest spots along the East Coast, but for context one of the two nuclear reactors near to which I grew up is equal to almost the entire wind power electricity generation in the entire Commonwealth.

But for all the supposed growth in renewables, we just are not seeing it in Pennsylvania, at least not at a scale to supplant fossil fuels. And unfortunately, it is not as if demand is falling. And that might be why we are seeing quiet talks about reactivating some of Pennsylvania’s shuttered nuclear reactors. If you could bump that nuclear share of electric throat back up to 40% or even 50%, you could cut down that natural gas usage significantly.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Energy Production in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania was the country’s first state to operate a nuclear power plant for electricity generation and is today the second-largest nuclear-generated electricity state after Illinois. But in recent years the triple threat of the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale natural gas boom, wind power subsidies, and solar power subsidies have hit the state’s nuclear industry hard. Consequently the power company Exelon has announced plans to shutdown the generating station at Three Mile Island—yes, that Three Mile Island—in 2019 if Pennsylvania does not rescue the industry as have the states of Illinois and New York, each facing similar challenges.

I wanted to take a look at the electricity generated by nuclear power in Pennsylvania, but had to settle for energy produced. And while the data was only as recent as 2014, it did extend back to 1960 thereby dating back almost as far back as nuclear power in Pennsylvania—it began in 1957.

The subject has always been of interest to me and was the focus of one of my first data visualisation pieces back at university. And so while the data is not quite the same, nor over the same geographic area, it is interesting to see the spike since even 2008. (Worth noting that even in a coal state the long, slow decline of coal even before President Obama is self-evident.)

The rise of Marcellus Shale natural gas has been quick and dramatic
The rise of Marcellus Shale natural gas has been quick and dramatic

Unfortunately the EIA data came through a .pdf and not a more accessible data file so I spent most of my time recreating the data. Consequently, I had little time to do more than track these changes. But even still, I think you would agree the message is clear: natural gas has quickly disrupted the market. (Let’s again ignore the fact I could not plot renewable energy sources.)

Small disclaimer I suppose, I have always supported nuclear power as part of a non-carbon energy portfolio. But I also grew up within sight of and fascinated by the Limerick Generating Station steam clouds, so call me biased.

Credit for this graphic is mine.