Carbon Flow Tracing based Consumer’s Indirect Carbon Emissions Calculation

Incentives for carbon emissions abatement not only from electricity generation but also from electricity consumers side is the focus of greenhouse gas emission reduction policies in China. However, quantifying indirect carbon emission from the consumers’ electricity usage is mostly based on fixed regional carbon emission factors, which is difficult to identify the users’ green electricity usage, therefore less incentive is activated from the consumption side. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a novel carbon emission flow (CEF) tracing method to establish a mapping relationship between power consumption and carbon emissions. Different from the traditional CEF tracing method based on the assumption of proportional sharing principle, the derivation of the proposed method is totally based on circuit theory, using node susceptance parameters and real-time generation carbon emission calculating indirect carbon emissions. Case study using the proposed approach are compared with the proportional sharing method and average carbon emission factor method, the results demonstrate that the proposed method can more accurately reflect the temporal and spatial characteristics of consumers than average carbon emission factor method, and is more in line with the actual operation of the system than the proportional sharing method, providing an analytical tool for indirect carbon accounting and monitoring.