This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher and Tagyatta.

You may have noticed your summertime electricity bills when you're cranking the AC.

They're more pricey than your wintertime payments.

That's because air conditioning is an electricity hog,

and when a whole city or region turns down the thermostat,

utilities have to meet that increased demand somehow.

This is often when we turn on the oldest power plants or the dirtier power plants.

Tracy Holloway, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Some of these older power plants that may run on fuel oil or may run on coal

only come on on the hottest days.

Using data from the EPA, Holloway and her team studied how air pollutants respond

when the temperature goes up. They found that across the eastern US, for

every degree Celsius temperature rise, power plants belched out 140,000 metric tons of additional carbon dioxide.

And emissions of the pollutants sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides rose 3.5% per extra degree of heat averaged across the region.

That's especially bad because hot summer days are the worst days to pump out more pollution.

These hot days when we turn on the air conditioning across the US or across our state

also happen to be the most chemically reactive days.

So every unit of air pollution that's going into the air is, you know, that much more likely to form ozone.

And ozone itself is a potent air pollutant.

The studies in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Holloway says the answer to this summertime pollution peak

may be an energy source that thrives on hot sunny days.

If we could be getting solar electricity during this peak time, it may offset this hot weather

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