Tracing carbon dioxide emissions in the European electricity markets

TL;DR

This paper compares two methods of calculating consumption-based CO2 emissions in European electricity markets, highlighting how imports influence emission attribution, especially for smaller, well-connected countries, with implications for policy and measurement accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of two consumption-based emission measurement methods and examines their impact on emission attribution in European countries from 2016 to 2019.

Findings

Imports significantly affect emission attribution for small, well-connected countries.

Methodological choices influence emission measures at hourly and yearly levels.

Differences between methods highlight importance of input-output model assumptions.

Abstract

Consumption-based carbon emission measures aim to account for emissions associated with power transmission from distant regions, as opposed to measures which only consider local power generation. Outlining key differences between two different methodological variants of this approach, we report results on consumption-based emission intensities of power generation for European countries from 2016 to 2019. We find that in particular for well connected smaller countries, the consideration of imports has a significant impact on the attributed emissions. For these countries, implicit methodological choices in the input-output model are reflected in both hourly and average yearly emission measures.