Negative water consumption impact for electricity mix processes using ELCD 3.2

Question

Hello

I noticed that some ELCD 3.2 datasets for electricity mix had a negative water consumption impact when calculating with ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) method. For example:

Option	Water consumption (m3)
Electricity Mix, consumption mix, at consumer, AC, 1kV - 60kV DE	-7.50914e-5
Electricity Mix, consumption mix, at consumer, AC, 1kV - 60kV IS	-3.52961e-4
Electricity Mix, consumption mix, at consumer, AC, 1kV - 60kV PL	-6.39376e-4
Electricity Mix, consumption mix, at consumer, AC, 1kV - 60kV SI	-4.15033e-4

For the example project I have created a process for every option with 1 kg flows as input and output (without provider) and 1 MJ of the selected energy mix input provided by the related process. For each process I created a product system manually selecting the provider (auto-link processes off).

Did I miss something or is this a database problem or is this the result of some sort of subtitution taken into consideration by the creators of the database?

If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate the help

BTW thank you for providing openlca software as open source, it's very useful and important to provide an accessible solution for everyone

Chris

Answer 1

What you did sounds ok, and reasons for these negative values can indeed be the datasets, where avoided product / system expansion modeling has been applied, which can lead to negative results. You can check (in LCIA analysis, e.g.) where this negative values are coming from.

(and thank you for your supportive message!)