Recent results fromenergyand emissions tracking in the US electricity system

Abstract

Electric sector emissions represent a large and growing fraction of anthropogenic emissions and should be a strong focus for environmental policy measures. In electric grids with significant penetrations of renewables, the emissions intensity of electricity varies in space and time. To encourage and guide decarbonization efforts, we need better tools to monitor the emissions embodied in electricity consumption, production and exchanges. Previous efforts resulted in a dataset for 2016 electricity and emissions at the hourly and balancing-area levels in the US electricity system. We now provide tools to make such datasets available much faster, by using an approximation for released emissions and an algorithm to automate data cleaning. As an example of how this type of new, detailed information on the electricity system can be used, we assess the current impacts of high penetrations of renewables on other grid components in the US. We demonstrate how dispatchable generation and electricity exchanges play an essential role in integrating fluctuating wind and solar generation.

Evaluating the hourly emissions intensity of the US electricity system

“…Because this dataset is focused on tracking long-term trends in power sector carbon emissions, it does not include consumed emissions factors or data for emissions other than CO 2 . Work by Chalendar et al in 2019 led to the creation of the 'gridemissions' project, which was the first publicly-available dataset of both generated and consumed, hourly lifecycle CO 2 emissions factors for the U.S., published on only a several-hour lag [1,29,43]. Instead of relying on measured emissions data and reported fuel consumption data, the gridemissions project makes use of a relatively new source of near-real-time hourly generation and interchange data available for each balancing authority through EIA Form 930 [44].…”