National Emission Factors for Electricity have been updated
The Joint Research Center has updated the national emission factors for electricity for Covenant of Mayors signatory cities from the Eastern Partnership countries.
On March 18, 2021, as part of the technical support for the EC initiative “Covenant of Mayors”, the EC Joint Research Center (JRC) published updated national factors for calculating CO2 emissions and CO2eq from electricity consumption in the Eastern Partnership countries for 1990-2018.
European and national emission factors for determining the level of indirect emissions from electricity consumption are calculated by the JRC by dividing the total national CO2 emissions from electricity production using all energy carriers by the total final electricity consumption.
According to established practice, the factors are calculated for two different approaches to energy consumption in electricity generation: the “standard” approach of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which takes into account the carbon content of the fuel, and the Life Cycle Approach (LCA), which takes into account the actual emissions at all stages of the life cycle, including the final combustion of the fuel.
The previous database of national factors (1990-2015) was presented in March 2020, and the new factors can be found here.
It is important to note that all Covenant of Mayors signatories who are still in the process of the SECAPs development or have already completed it, but have not yet submitted those SECAPs for approval by the JRC through the online platform “My Agreement”, do not need to recalculate the Baseline Emission Inventories (BEI) using updated factors.
The updated factors are intended for new signatories who are just starting work on the calculation of BEIs and the SECAPs development. Thus, BEIs calculated on the basis of previous emission factors (1990-2015) and presented in 2021 will be accepted for consideration by the JRC.
Moreover, it should be noted that the previous (1990-2015) and new (1990-2018) time series are consistent, and there are only minor changes between the “old” and “new” emission factors for the Eastern Partnership region, since the calculation of the factors is based on the same methodology and the same data sources.