eleI've been learning a bunch about energy lately. A lot of this is reminding me of things I learned in ages past, refreshing from middle school science class.
However, these days I find a lot of this easier to learn because I have context that I didn't have when I was a kid. This is sort of a continuation of me really getting electricity usage hammered home by a home energy meter. This post is mostly me playing with numbers to understand things better- feel free to skip.
Take my gas bill here in Edmonton. We're billed by the Gigajoule (an interesting contrast by the way to Ottawa, where were billed for gas usage in cubic meters).
What is a Gigajoule? Well, a little googling reminds me that a Joule is a watt second; so a Gigajoule is a billion watt seconds. A bit of math then gets you to the Watt hour (10^9 J / (60 * 60) = 277,777 J), and divided by 1000 gets you 277 kWh.
I don't know what to call it when different energy sources have different levels of usability (ie; I can use electricity in my house to power my blender, but I can't really burn gas to do the same thing), but discounting that, 1 GJ of gas is equivalent to 277 kWh of electricity.
Alright, cool! We did a cool conversion, and now we can compare things on a level(-ish) playing field.
So, Andrea and I pay $0.0789 per kWh for electricity, and we pay $0.816 per GJ for gas. Knowing what we know now about that conversion, that means we get a price of $0.00293 per kWh for gas: Which means that electricity is roughly 27x more expensive than gas.
Ok, so that's not great (climate wise). Let's rejigger things a bit. Andrea and I intentionally are 1) Locked into an energy price 2) Paying extra for 'green' energy. Let's instead compare against "low cost" renewable projects. These days, records are being broken for low bids everywhere, but in Alberta we have wind projects with bids at $0.037 per kWh.
If we use that price instead of what Andrea and I are paying, we see a difference of closer to 12.5x.
In Alberta, before the election of our new conservative government, we had a carbon levy of $1.517 per GJ. So if we factor that into our cost calculation, using the lower cost electricity, and gas with the carbon levy, we get to a price difference of 4.5x.
So, according to this random website on the internet, natural gas produces 56.1 kg of CO2 per GJ. This means roughly 17.8 GJ of natural gas produces one tonne of carbon dioxide (and, the Alberta Carbon Levy was priced at $27/ton.)
To get to price parity with 3.7c per kWh for electricity, we would need a carbon levy of more than 150$ per tonne. This is a fascinating number to come up with, because I've heard the number thrown around before.
Anyhow. This blog post is long and boring, but for me it was a fascinating attempt to work the numbers and understand things better.