International Energy Agency IEA CADv2024

Dataset info

Publications included

IEA Emission Factors 2024, IEA Life Cycle Upstream Emission Factors 2024 (licence required)

Methodological Readout Details

Changes compared with v2023

Inclusion of 2022 (final) and 2023 provisional factors

Since IEA has a very slow publishing cycle, the 2024 publication (Sept 2024) only includes final factors until 2022 (Y-2) for all countries, and contains provisional factors for 2023 (Y-1) for half of the countries (heavy skew towards Global North). This process is repeated annually.

This 2024 update in Carbon+Alt+Delete therefore replaces the provisional 2022 with the 2022 (final) values, and replaces the previously extrapolated values for 2023 with 2023 provisional values. With this process comes variability, accentuated by the fact that global energy markets have been unpredictable in the past couple of years. For more details on this process, see IEA 2024 methodology.

These are the general trends:

• Entries with reporting year 2023: -10% to +5% (global average -2.8%)
• Entries with reporting year 2022: -5% to +5% (global average -0.1%)

There are however outliers to this, with most of the outliers in the Global South. Some highlighted outliers, hand-picked for relevance:

Historical correction to 2017-2021

By the nature of IEA's process, all emission factors 1990-current are re-evaluated and re-published every year. This impacts all IEA emission factors for time periods 2017-2021 on Carbon+Alt+Delete. Changes are usually very small (<1.5%) and tend to affect mostly countries in the Global South. Although, there are exceptions to this. A summary of the most relevant changes:

• -1.5% to +1.5% for the time period 2021-2019 for EU countries
• -0.5% to 0.5% for the time period 2019-2017 for EU countries

Here as well, there are outliers to these trends. Some highlighted outliers, hand-picked for relevance:

Please note that the 2023 provisional values for the regions "European Union (without UK)" and "European Union (with UK)" were dismissed from the dataset for their high deviation (-80%) with historical data. The 2022 (final) values were used as alternatives.

Upstream Factors 2017-2022

The transition of IEA Life Cycle Upstream Factors from pilot to final version also included a temporal scope increase, now also including upstream values before 2022 and for more countries. We have now integrated these in our 2017-2021 factors, replacing the extrapolations of last year.

Expected change:

• -10% to +10% for generation emissions for all countries in the period 2021-2017, with +30% to -30% for outliers.

If these changes significantly impacted the life-cycle emissions of electricity factors, they are included in the highlighted historical corrections in previous section.

GWP changes for all years

In 2024, the IEA moved to AR6 GWP100 values in order to align with CSRD/ESRS requirements. More details on p6 of the 2024 methodology. This impact has also already been considered in the year-on-year comparisons in the sections above.

Important keyword changes

IEA electricity keyword details have changed for to improve clarity and transparency

• Green has been renamed to Green electricity contract
• Country average has been renamed to Country average mix
• The detail Grey has been discontinued, as to better reflect that the original source does not take into account residual mix ("grey energy") calculations. All entries using the term grey have been remapped to "country average mix". This change has no impact on the emission factor value.

If you like to use a source that does take into account the effect of residual mixes, please consider switching to AIB dataset. If you are looking for non-European residual mix numbers, please reach out to our community or our support for more guidance.

Other changes

• Some instances were removed where the source used "0" to indicate "no information available. These values are now no longer available
• Former Yugoslavia has been added as a country in the list
• Transmission and distribution values are written as CO2e values, no longer as CO2 values, as the source no longer suggests these are CO2 only

Dataset Quality Flags

The IEA dataset reflects average grid emissions, and does not contain any information about residual mixes, and therefore should be avoided when representing a non-green electricity contract. This might lead to double-counting of renewable energy credits and misrepresenting market-based emissions.

This dataset does not contain information about the bioCO2 produced by electricity generated by biofuels.

The slow publishing cycle of IEA introduces relative big shifts for emissions, especially in recent years (Y-1 and Y-2). These should be used with caution and with a good understanding of the uncertainty involved.

Aggregated regional factors (like European Union or ASEAN) should be used with caution, as they represent aggregations of data collected by different entities using different processes.

Emission Factor Flags

The country average mix factors for

• Iceland
• Ethiopia

are zero or near-zero for all years in the dataset (2017-2023) due to their high share of renewable energies.

The keyword "China" in C+A+D refers to People's Republic of China in the IEA source documentation.

Links

www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-product/emissions-factors-2024