The trends of hourly carbon emission factors in Germany and investigation on relevant consumption patterns for its application

Journal article, 2017

Purpose The share of variable renewable energy sources (vRES) in the German electricity grid has increased over the past few decades. Due to the nature of the generation pattern of vRES, the increase of vRES causes the emission factor (EF) to fluctuate on an hourly basis. This fluctuation raises concerns about the accuracy of quantifying emissions with the current metric of the annual average EF as the respective EF may change depending on the time at which it is consumed. Methods The study calculated the hourly EF of Germany from 2011 to 2015 and investigated the effect of an increase of vRES on the EF. The calculated hourly EF was clustered based on three aspects of time: the period of time, the time of a day, and the day of the week. Results and discussion The study showed a higher proportion of vRES on weekend daytimes while the weekday nighttimes resulted in a lower share than the annual average. The study highlighted potential underestimation and overestimation of emissions by using annual average EF which ranged from +22% (2015 weekday nighttime of October) to −34% (2015 weekend daytime of May). Conclusions The study suggested that the application of hourly EF may be necessary to quantify the respective emission from the consumers that use electricity during the weekend daytime and weekend nighttime. For consumer use at other times, the emissions could be quantified appropriately by using the conventional annual average EF.