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New research from NAU found that a global database produced by the Climate TRACE consortium, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, is underestimating greenhouse gas emissions at power plants by an average of 50%.

Professor Kevin Gurney of Northern Arizona University's School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems analyzed the carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the recently released Climate TRACE database. He said these findings raise concerns because accurate and reliable information on greenhouse gas emissions is a critical ingredient for society's response to climate change.

The research is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

"I was interested in how accurately Climate TRACE could estimate power plant CO 2 emissions when using exciting new techniques based on artificial intelligence," Gurney said. "However, only about 4% of the U.S. facilities we analyzed use an AI-based approach. The remainder, 96%, use a very approximate method. This is where the large differences were found."

Gurney and his team matched the Climate TRACE power plants in the United States to a database produced by Gurney's laboratory, "Vulcan-power," which is cross-calibrated with multiple U.S. datasets including those from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.

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