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Europe: Improve emission factors with 2023 data and better mapping #6581
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EU-ETS data is now available for 2023 (under "Documentation"). As I see it, there are three issues:
Of course, the same applies to coal and oil. At least coal is slowly going away and oil is rarely used. |
awesome work and explanation, thank you! |
Thanks for sharing the update @w-flo, we are planning on addressing this soon and updating the numbers - hopefully we can include your great work! We will get back in touch soon :) |
This list (shared here) might be useful to look at what power plants are active: |
An update here: We are actively working on this project these days! We are going to:
I am currently looking into the larger differences found for some zones between our calculations and those in https://github.com/w-flo/eu-emission-factors/blob/main/data/2023/output/countries.csv |
I think @w-flo might have used different fuel mappings for some, I remember we discussed that the Sweden plan that used oil was converted to use bio-oil that has a lower carbon footprint. (Not that it matters that much as we don't get any oil production data from Sweden anyway, despite me emailing both ENTSO-E and SVK about it). |
Cool! Of course I'm available if you have any questions about these CSVs in my repo. I'm interested in those differences in country-level data, too. I see you're already on it :-) Is the powerplant-level data from electricitymaps available somewhere, maybe as a gist/pastebin? I don't think I use any sort of fuel mapping, I just use the ENTSO-E "ProductionType" from the ENTSO-E CSV. If a unit is claimed to be using "Fossil Oil" (that's the string they use for oil units) by ENTSO-E, I count it as oil. I assume the ETS data would indicate lower carbon emissions for that power plant if they actually use bio oil instead of fossil oil, so that lower carbon footprint should hopefully be reflected in the results. |
I have made a public Google Sheet here that contains our current (temporary!) calculations compared to yours: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cdHJm_h63taXl9dXiJN7TFG-WAQsGvdHiYp9kuwaE0w/edit?usp=sharing I also added the plant-level information now, and it's clear that something is off with the code for manual matching (I don't get the same manual matches you did, e.g. only 1 coal power plant for Finland instead of 5). I'll get to work on that today. Secondly there's also examples where the heat-allocation and therefore emissions are very different: w-flo for Finland
emaps for Finland
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I expected differences due to the heat allocation thing. I really don't trust my method a lot, there is a good chance I got some of it wrong. And I'm not sure the electricitymaps method is better (I'm not sure how it works). I think we'd need more data to make it work correctly. If I understand it correctly, the "ETS heat allocation" is based on "how much heat did this combined heat and power plant produce in a reference period a few years ago?", so trying to estimate recent heat generation based on that number is problematic. So I'd say that's pretty much an unsolved problem. About those missing coal power plants in Finland: Maybe that's a "plausible emission factor range filter"? The missing coal power plants in Finland have surprisingly good emission factors. The Naantalin plant has 116 for example, which would be highly unusual for a coal power plant, but according to a comment in my manual_matches.csv file, it has been converted to a biomass power plant recently (apparently I googled it back then). Same for Vaskiluoto 2, which has an emission factor of 324, but it's not purely a coal power plant, it also has a biomass unit. Maybe electricitymaps filters that because it seems weird to have a plant that claims to be coal-powered and has an emission factor of 324. Similar issue for Belgium: The Knippegroen plant is missing in the electricitymaps data, maybe because it's a gas-powered plant with an emission factor of 2300. However, it burns process gas (blast furnace gas?) instead of "normal fossil gas", which apparently results in pretty high emissions. Similar to Mittelsbueren 4 in Germany, Velsen in the Netherlands or DK6 in France. Although I'm not 100% sure if it's fair to include these plants, they're tightly coupled with steel manufacturers and maybe some of their emissions should actually be attributed to the steel plants instead of the power plant – so filtering them might actually be a good idea. Not really sure. Edit: The Hanasaari plant in Finland might be missing from electricitymaps data because it's an automatic match. |
I wonder if there could also be an issue with these converted plants having changed their reported fuel. That could cause significant changes if it was previously reported as coal and now as biomass for example. Then I expect the coal calculations to be much higher with the removal of the biomass plants. But we would have to doublecheck with ENTSO-E production data. |
Naantali switched to mostly using biomass, thanks to the new unit Naantali B4, in 2017. And Naantali B4 is listed as "Fossil Hard coal" in Entso-E unit-level data as of today. But this source says: "Although original plans were for the plant to be co-fired by coal, TSME later said it planned for the unit to be fueled 100% by biomass and waste". ETS data seems to agree with that. So it is pretty confusing. I'm not exactly sure if this means that Naantali B4 production will be counted as coal in the "generation per production type" ENTSO-E live data, but I hope it does. In that case, Finland should simply have a really good emission factor for their "coal" power production, since it appears to be mostly biomass with just a few old coal blocks mixed in for exceptional circumstances. |
We're still actively working on this on the side - we have something close to done, but still going deeper into significant changes on a power-plant level to investigate why they are changing. As an example of this, I now have a case where 2 coal power plants in Poland are both reported as "-1" emission for 2023 in the EU-ETS dataset, despite no public information about these power plants not being active 🤔 This is the 2022 data we have:
Without these for 2023, we now get a 15% drop in coal emission factor for Poland... I am leaning towards staying with the current 2022 numbers for cases like this, but if anyone has any ideas on a better approach I'd love to hear it :) |
"I now have a case where 2 coal power plants in Poland are both reported as "-1" emission for 2023 in the EU-ETS dataset" Is there any way to verify/discuss these numbers with officials from the EU? |
@madsnedergaard this is what you are looking at right now right? |
Good point, I have sent an email to https://www.kobize.pl/ that is listed as the contact point for Poland here https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-system-eu-ets/union-registry_en |
I've seen missing ETS data with some power plants / countries in earlier years, they tend to be fixed in the next release (i.e. April 2025). Maybe using the previous year's emission factor for these power plants is the best solution. I took the lazy approach and simply ignore power plants with missing ETS data in my repo. |
It turns out these two power plants have now apparently reported ETS data (edit: for 2023), this source appears to update pretty often (i.e. more frequently than once a year): The "-1" probably happens when they report too late for the April report. |
That is brilliant, thanks for sharing! I have identified 16 relevant entries where emissions are "-1", and I was able to manually find updated values on that website for 12 of those! :) |
Description
We are aware that the current emission factors based on EU-ETS could be improved further.
See past discussions here: #5417
And the great work by @w-flo here: https://github.com/w-flo/eu-emission-factors/tree/main
This issue is intended to gather knowledge and details about how we can improve this further for next time we can update the numbers, as EU-ETS is supposed to release new data quite soon (during April as far as I can tell).
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