Overall Electricity contribution - Ecoinvent 3.10 + EN15804

Question

Considering a process and on a specific impact category, is it possible to extract / calculate in a easy way the overall contribution due to "electricity"?

What I mean is a kind of PERM, with focus on electricity (rather than primary energy) and evaluated on the different impact categories

Answer 1

There is already the possibility to use sector tags, but they are mixed with default tags from ecoinvent, which are not well maintained. We have added already the sector names/categories from ecoinvent as tags. All sector contributions add up to the total impact value and each process has exactly one sector tag. You have to activate the experimental feature "Enable contributions by tags in result views".

For your example of electricity, you can look at the tags results for "Sector: electricity" which is the result over the whole supply chain. There is also some small contributions from sub-categories like "Sector: electricity; transport" which is only the railway sector in Switzerland, or "Sector: electricity; metals" which is Cobalt and Aluminium industry and so on. You can also copy/paste/export the tags results and delete the default tags without the "Sector: ..." name in front. 

Comments

thanks!
in order to interpretate the results properly: tag results may overlap right? i mean, if i sum all the impact by tag, i will have some double counting, right?

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No, as I wrote before, each process has exactly one tag that starts with "Sector: ...". If you add up all tags called "Sector: ..." you will get exactly the total impact result.

Do not add up "coal power" or "hard coal power", since these are the default tags from ecoinvent which might lead to double counting and which might be not maintained or confusing. Better use only the tags starting with "Sector: ..." that we have added from the sector names for processes from ecoinvent.

Answer 2

Interesting idea, we plan to enhance tags in future versions so that they not only calculate direct impacts but also supply chain impacts, this would probably solve it (tagging electricity then)?

Comments

for sure a tag would be enough, then a view of the totaql impact by tag would solve this.
This kind of evaluation is being more and more important, in order to biuld decarbonization startegy for example