托福听力之考古学背景知识解密

You may have noticed your summertime electricity bills, when you're cranking the A–C, are more pricey than your wintertime That's because air-conditioning is an electricity And when a whole city or region turns down the thermostat, utilities have to meet that increased demand

"This is often when we turn on the oldest plants or the dirtier power " Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin in "Some of these older plants that only run on fuel oil or run on coal only run on the hottest "

Using data from the EPA, Holloway and her team studied how air pollutants respond when the temperature goes They found that across the eastern , for every degree Celsius temperature rise, power plants belched out 140,000 metric tons of additional carbon And emissions of the pollutants sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides rose three and a half percent per extra degree of heat, averaged across the

That's especially bad, because hot summer days are the worst days to pump out more "These hot days, when we turn on the air conditioning across the or the state also happen to be the most chemically reactive Every unit of air pollution going into the air is that much more likely to form " And ozone itself is a potent air The study is in the journal Environmental Science and [David Abel et , Response of Power Plant Emissions to Ambient Temperature in the Eastern United States]

Holloway says the answer to this summertime pollution peak may be an energy source that thrives on hot, sunny "If we could be getting solar electricity during this peak time it may offset this hot weather midday peak and be a great solution for avoiding having to turn on those peaking power " In other words: why not use the sun, to keep

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