Posters

Abstract

All photons are not created equal in their ability to displace greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the electricity sector and thus production by wind farms globally have differing impacts on climate change mitigation efforts. WHEN and WHERE a wind farm delivers power to the local grid has a large impact on the avoided GHG compared to fossil fuel generation. Traditional GHG emission calculators (e.g. ghgprotocol.org) use non-time dependent but regionally specific Carbon Dioxide (CO2) equivalent emission factors to determine emissions from consumed electricity. However, emissions intensity of an electricity network is dependent on the fuel mix of each scheduling period. The mix of generators (both fuel type and amount) dispatched in a particular scheduling interval (the ‘bid-stack’) contains varying emissions intensity. The non-profit organisation WattTime has created a method to identify and evaluate the marginal fuel type and its associated emissions that more accurately captures the beneficial impact of adopting renewable energy or reducing consumption compared to market average emission values. Correctly accounting for the temporal dependency of grid emissions intensity permits wind farm owners to accurately document their contributions to reducing scope 2 GHG emissions. This work describes how wind farm owners can embrace digitalisation and new state-of-the-art understanding of grid operations to incorporate the temporal dependency of grid emissions intensity into avoided GHG emissions calculations to improve Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting.