International Energy Agency IEA CADv2024
Last updated
Last updated
Full name
International Energy Agency Greenhouse Gas emissions from Energy
Publisher
International Energy Agency
Description
Data published by the International Energy Agency in the 'Greenhouse gas emissions from energy' publications. Each publication contains all emission factors for all previous years with corrections.
Version nr.
CADv2024
, (licence required)
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 .
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:
Austria
2023
-24.9%
Brazil
2023
-20.2%
Denmark
2023
-32.1%
Italy
2022
-11.0%
Italy
2023
-25.8%
Netherlands
2023
-20.5%
Norway
2022
-30.6%
Norway
2023
-33.9%
Portugal
2023
-31.8%
Spain
2023
-20.9%
Sweden
2022
-7.5%
Switzerland
2022
-10.8
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:
Belgium
2018
-2.8%
Belgium
2019
-1.8%
Denmark
2017
-3.6%
Denmark
2018
-4.6%
France
2019
-5.0%
France
2020
-4.7%
France
2021
-3.5%
Luxembourg
2017
-9.4%
Luxembourg
2018
-8.1%
Luxembourg
2019
-6.2%
Luxembourg
2020
-2.3%
Luxembourg
2021
+2.2%
United Kingdom
2019
+3.2%
United Kingdom
2020
+3.9%
United Kingdom
2021
+3.0%
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
In 2024, the IEA moved to AR6 GWP100 values in order to align with CSRD/ESRS requirements. More details on p6 of the . This impact has also already been considered in the year-on-year comparisons in the sections above.
If you like to use a source that does take into account the effect of residual mixes, please consider switching to . If you are looking for non-European residual mix numbers, please reach out to our or for more guidance.