TRACKING THE INDUSTRY Mitsubishi Power and UCF Develop NOx Tracking Tool to Provide Transparency into Emissions from the U.S. Power Industry
Mitsubishi Power Americas and the University of Central Florida
have formed an industry-education partnership to establish a reliable and accessible source of information that tracks nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions as the U.S. power generation industry undergoes an energy transformation to decarbonize. The online Power Generation NOx Tracker uses data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database as analyzed by UCF’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research (CATER) to show trends over time. The NOx Tracker is accessible at no cost to the public and interested parties such as industry,
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research, government and nongovernment organizations. This is the second tracker Mitsubishi Power has helped launch in its efforts to inform the public and industry about progress toward decarbonization. The Carnegie Mellon University Power Sector Carbon Index, which estimates the carbon dioxide intensity of the U.S. power sector using publicly available data sources, launched in 2017. The 1990 U.S. Clean Air Act amendments brought additional standards to the power sector to reduce the level of nitrogen oxides emitted into the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides are pollutants produced when nitrogen and oxygen react at
high temperatures, such as in power plants, automobiles, boats, and heavy vehicles. The EPA reported annual nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants fell by 87% from 1995 to 2020. “As a university our role is to teach and produce research that solves a public challenge,” says Jayanta Kapat, the UCF engineering professor who leads CATER and is responsible for the data analysis on the NOx Tracker. “Innovation driven by industry and academia is changing the power generation landscape. We need to make sure as we advance that we do so responsibly. There has been concern that as the power generation industry decarbonizes, nitrogen oxides would become a problem;
