EU emission factors
The European Commission publishes verified emissions and allocations for all installations included in the EU emissions trading scheme (EU-ETS). This dataset is updated on an annual basis and is available here. This dataset includes emissions and allocations for all EU thermal power plants.
ENTSO-E publishes generation per unit for the majority of European transmission system operators (TSO).
Extracting data from 2021, the ENTSO-E power plants were matched to the corresponding installations in the EU-ETS dataset. The carbon intensity of the power plant can then be calculated. Power plant carbon intensities are then averaged per mode to get regional emission factors at the zone level.
For zones for which generation per unit data is not available, the emission factors used will be the average of all available factors. These factors will be the European average emission factors.
The methodology to compute the EU direct emission factors is detailed in this following notebook: EU_emission_factors.ipynb.
All the datasets used in the process are available and are listed below:
- ENTSO-E generation per unit for 2021 (csv)
- EU-ETS allocations and verified emissions (csv)
- Power plants mapped manually (csv)
- Heat allocation model (spreadsheet)
The figure below shows the difference between the European average lifecycle emission factors and the default lifecycle emission factors.
Figure 1: Comparison of European lifecycle emission factors and default lifecycle factors
