Model 1: Power Generation (IC10 and IC70)
The TICCS superclasses IC10 (Power Generation x-Renewables) and IC70 (Renewable Power) describe the assets in this model and represent 22 subclasses in total. We apply ABMs for fossil fuel power generation, which rely on the type of fuel consumed by the power plant, the electricity generation per year, or the plant’s installed capacity. We use different EFs for each type of fuel to distinguish how many tons of CO2 are released per kWh of energy produced. If electricity generation is unavailable, we use the power plant's capacity and calculate the emissions based on the assets’ CFs and EFs. Both are built from a variety of sources, employing either theoretical values offered in the literature or bottom-up approaches from the data.
We use the World Resource Institute’s Global Power Plant Database (WRI GPPD) and in-house collected data to extract the following:
names and geolocations for each power plant in our list of assets
information on primary fuel
capacity (in MW)
actual and/or estimated electricity generation (in GWh) for different years (WRI, 2021)
Assuming an asset’s capacity would not change, we apply the forward propagation technique to replace missing capacity values over time. We validate our predictions through a variety of public sources.
We estimate Scope 1 emissions based on the following equations.
When the actual electricity generation of an asset is known, we calculate:
Scope 1 [tCO2e] = electricity generation [GWh] x EF [kgCO2e/kWh] x 1e3
When the actual electricity generation of an asset is unknown, we apply the CF[1]:
Scope 1 [tCO2e] = power capacity [MW] x CF [%] x (MW to kWh) x EF [kgCO2e/kWh] x 1e-3
where (MW to kWh) = 365.25 (days) x 24 (hours/day) x 1e3 (kWh in a MWh).
Scope 2 emissions are negligible for power plants as they produce their own electricity, and Scope 3 emissions (mainly relating to the transmission of electricity to consumers and maintenance of the power plant) are expected to be small in comparison to Scope 1 emissions.
[1] The CF here represents the amount of time in a year (in per cent, also called the availability factor) multiplied by the installed capacity (in per cent) employed by the plant. Accordingly, a plant with a CF of 1 would mean that the power plant is running throughout the year at maximum capacity. A value of zero would mean that the plant is either not running or not employing any of its capacity.
WRI (2021). Global Power Plant Database V1.3.0. World Resource Institute. https://datasets.wri.org/dataset/globalpowerplantdatabase