Report GHG protocol compliant scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions from purchased electricity, steam, heat and cooling in your organisation
Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, heating, cooling and steam, from a utility provider. The GHG standard highlights two approaches to allocate Scope 2 GHG emissions to the end consumer: location-based and market-based. The market-based method reflects emissions from electricity that companies have purposefully chosen (or their lack of choice), while the location-based method reflects the average emissions intensity of grids on which energy consumption occurs.
The four types of purchased energy tracked in scope 2 are as follows:
- Electricity: Used by almost all companies to operate machines, lighting, electric vehicle charging, and heating and cooling systems.
- Steam: Steam is a valuable energy source for industrial processes. It is used for mechanical work, heat or as a process medium.
- Heat: Most commercial or industrial buildings require heat to control interior climates and heat water. Many industrial processes also require heat for specific equipment. Heat may be produced from electricity or through a non-electrical process such as solar thermal heat or thermal combustion processes (as with a boiler or a thermal power plant) outside the company’s operational control.
- Cooling: Similar to heat, cooling may be produced from electricity or through the distribution of cooled air or water.
See all inputs and outputs on the technical API documentation.
Inputs
This endpoint receives:
- a datasource to base calculations on
- the date for which the footprint should be computed
- For each purchased utility, the following information:
- Utility type
- Value
- Unit
- Number of units under Guarantee of Origin
- Fuel source
- Emission factor for market-based allocation (mg CO2e/kWh)
It is always preferable to use the units of energy consumption (kWh) as opposed to money spent on energy since it yields more accurate results. In cases where the energy consumption data is not available, the expenditure on energy is converted to an equivalent quantity of energy consumed based on the average price of the energy commodity. Note that spending to kWh conversion is currently only available for limited energy sources (electricity, district heating, diesel and gasoline) with support for other fuels types coming soon.
Outputs
This endpoint outputs:
- GHG emissions (in kg CO2e)
- Location-based
- Market-based
- For each purchased utility:
- Unique identifier
- GHG emissions ( kg CO2e)
- Energy consumption (kWh)
Calculations and sources
- Energy consumption
- Data Sources: AIB, VDA, SSB
- Description: To calculate emissions resulting from energy consumption, we source emissions data for different energy carriers from a mixture of reliable sources:
- Electricity production mix: The CO2 factor of the production mix is obtained by multiplying the quantity of each energy in the production mix with the CO2 factor of that energy source
- Electricity consumption mix: The consumption mix represents the actual consumption in a country. It includes the electricity that is imported and exported, alongside everything that is produced within the country.
- Electricity residual mix: The emissions of the residual mix are the emissions of the production mix adjusted with the issued and expired attributes for each energy source respectively.
- Purchased heating, cooling and steam: Calculated by dividing the emission factor per unit of energy of the fuel used by the thermal efficiency of the generation
- District heating: Calculated using data on Net production of district heating by fuel type from SSB and combining it with direct emission factors for district heating from the VDA publication on emission factors for electricity, district heating, and fuels
- Electricity Prices:
- Data Source: SSB
- Description: We use the yearly average price for purchased electricity from SSB.