A major part of the problem with being able to enforce air pollution restrictions on power plants is the inadequate monitoring and gaming of emissions data. Accurately monitoring data is a challenging thing to do! Power plants, as well as the people in charge of honestly collecting the data, can easily alter the information.
That’s where WattTime comes in to save the day! The nonprofit artificial intelligence firm is going to use satellite imagery to precisely track the air pollution (including carbon emissions) coming out of every single power plant in the world, in real time. They are putting eyes in the sky that will track all power plant pollution. And here’s the best part, they are going to make the data public.
WattTime promises to effectively eliminate inadequate monitoring and gaming of emissions data with their system. And since the data is going public, it won’t just be regulators and politicians who get to see it. Up to now, informational barriers have been a great big wall block to citizen action.
WattTime’s system is demolishing this walled barrier (so to speak) by enabling any citizen group in the world to go online and pull up a list of the dirtiest power plants in their area. The public can be more terrifying and punitive than any regulator when it comes to environmental enforcement, so this is huge.
We can only hope that the public will take action too because according to the latest State of Global Air report, air pollution is the fifth highest global mortality risk. It causes 5 million early deaths and 147 million years of healthy life lost every single year!
Not only that, but it has been linked to causing adolescent psychotic experiences, dementia, and more. If this isn’t enough reason to organize a retaliation against pollution, then nothing will be. All citizens will be armed with information so the battle should be easy.
This project was selected through the Google AI Impact Challenge, and funded by a grant of 1.7 million dollars by Google’s philanthropic wing Google.org. WattTime has a significant chance of becoming the global clearinghouse for transparent, reliable pollution data. It is a mission-based nonprofit with a track record, legitimate partners, and serious financial backing. The potential of this working out is massive.
How It Works
- It has already been demonstrated that a great deal of pollution can be tracked simply by identifying visible smoke.
- WattTime says it can also use infrared imaging to identify heat from smokestack plumes or cooling-water discharge.
- The data will come from a variety of sensors operating at different wavelengths, including thermal infrared that can detect heat.
- The images will be processed by various algorithms to detect signs of emissions.
- Sensors that can directly track NO2 emissions are in development, according to WattTime executive director Gavin McCormick.
- Between visible smoke, heat, and NO2, WattTime will be able to derive exact, real-time emissions information, including information on carbon emissions, for every power plant in the world. (McCormick says the data may also be used to derive information about water pollutants like nitrates or mercury.)
Short Term Results
According to McCormick, the collected data will immediately empower the following tools and avenues for pollution reduction:
Transparency – Pollution laws and international agreements will now be monitored and verified, eliminating suspicions of underreported emissions. Places will not be able to game the system by fiddling with local monitoring equipment or misreporting emissions anymore. Not now that there is a trusted, third-party source of verified information on every power plant. Transparent third-party verification will raise everyone’s confidence in the ability of regulators and negotiators to produce results.
Location – It will help renewable energy developers site their projects in areas where they can maximize emission reductions thanks to real-time, public air pollution data. Carbon Tracker has already shown that satellite data can be used for more precise financial analysis of power plants, hence why they know that 42 percent of the coal plants in the world are operating at a loss. WattTime’s program will further strengthen that analysis, and as a result, help better identify those areas where renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil power.
Fill In The Gaps – The collected data will fill in the gaps (there are many) in pollution monitoring worldwide. Furthermore, WattTime is already gathering data and working with partners who will put the information to use.
Long Term Results
Simply making the information available to the public empowers citizens, nonprofits, and state governments to organize pressure on the worst emitters. According to Archon Fung and Dara O’Rourke (of Harvard and MIT, respectively), this differs from conventional command-and-control regulation in four ways:
- In this situation, the role of government agencies “is not to set and enforce standards, but to establish an information-rich context for private citizens, interest groups, and firms to solve environmental problems.”
- Expert risk analysis does not set the standards. Instead, the standards are set according to what the public is willing to accept.
- Emitters “adopt pollution prevention and abatement measures in response to a dynamic range of public pressures rather than to formalized agency standards or governmental sanction.”
- Last but not least, the information allows public attention to focus on the worst emitters — maximum attention on minimum performers.
Time To Act!
What all this comes down to is that once the public knows what polluters are up to, it stops letting them get away with it. WattTime’s data could be used to organize citizen pressure on the biggest carbon emitters, on a global scale.
In the end, whether people do anything about this or not, the biggest polluters and the biggest cheaters will be exposed. Nobody, big or small, will be able to falsify their information. The public can see everything and do something about it!
