Coal emission factors (for ENTSO-E data) #4934
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There has been some discussions around this already here: #4219 (comment) The suggested approach in there would allow for highly granular and hourly emission factors while keeping our current categories. I hope this makes sense and if you with the approach I linked do feel free to raise your vote for it there as well, it will help us prioritize what to work on next. |
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Hey @mirkoschaefer, sorry for taking so long to answer!
I think we could adopt a per type approach her. I believe that the IEA sets everything that is derived from coal to coal, so we could attribute fossil coal-derived gas as coal. For oil shale and peat that's a bit more tricky. The best would indeed be to include them into unknown but that opens the door to a lot of complexity. I say this because it then means we also need to compute zone specific emission factors for unknown, that accounts for all unknown (and thus potentially stuff that is not reported in the EU-ETS scheme) Else we can just exclude them from the computation, do you think they can have a significant impact on the final emission factors? We're weighting everything by the total production, so my intuition is that it does not.
Many thanks for the plot, not being able to separate the types of coal does creates some issues at an hourly level (not yearly because aggregated we should end up with the same). I think this issue, and the amount of people not understanding that the computed emission factor accounts for the average mixup is a good argument for splitting up coal. The only issue is that it will require substantial work and we can't roll it out instantly. I guess a first step could be to refine the German data using some of your work on matching all of the German plants, which we could do in a more reasonable amount of time. Thanks for the final suggestion, we'll do that once we update the computation notebook :) |
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The current emission factors might overestimate emissions from coal for instance for Germany. In your method you aggregate the following technologies to coal:
Fossil Brown coal/Lignite, Fossil Coal-derived gas, Fossil Hard coal, Fossil Oil shale, Fossil Peat
With this aggregation there are two issues:
i) How to categorize Fossil Coal-derived gas, Fossil Oil shale and Fossil Peat
ii) How to discriminate between lignite and hard coal (significant generation for Germany, for instance)
i) Fossil Coal-derived gas, Fossil Oil shale and Fossil Peat could be classified as other or unknown. I am not sure about this, but this should be clarified since it probably has an impact on the emission factors. The per unit generation data for Germany, for instance, includes blocks with power generation from blast furnace gas, which have a very high emission factor. Since your method includes data from a limited number of power plants only, these plants could have a disproportionally high influence on the emission factor.
ii) You aggregate lignite and hard coal, although each of these types has high generation volumes, significant different emission factors, and separate generation data is available from ENTSO-E. Ideally, you should use and publish emission factors for lignite and hard coal separately, and separate the generation data in your pipeline. If you want to use one joint emission factor for coal and aggregate hard coal and lignite in your generation data pipeline, you should compare the generation capacity/generation for lignite and hard coal in the per unit generation data used in your method with the overall generation capacity/generation for these technologies in the different countries. Due to the limitation to power plants contained in the per unit generation data from ENTSO-E and the automatic matching procedure, there might be a considerable difference. In this case you could add corresponding scaling factors in your method. Finally, it would be helpful to compare the hourly shares of lignite/hard coal in the joint coal generation data. This would help to estimate the impact of aggregating these technologies.
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