HB Carbon Emission Intensity - Emissions Profiles Source

[jakechevrier]

Hi LBT team,

First off thank you again for another amazing release of LBT, always pushing the boundaries!

I’ve been in the weeds with carbon emissions lately, and have been digging into the new HB CEI component, and have a couple questions to LBT or the general community…

Seeing that this is based on the NREL Carbon Emissions Measure, under “resources” in that repository they have a mix of annual values and hourly profiles that are mostly mapped by eGrid regions.

• When providing a location from an epw, is the component using eGrid regions or state emissions profiles?
• What is the source for these values in the repository?
• What projection scenario are these profiles? (mid-case, low renewable cost, high renewable cost, ect…)
• Are these short-run or long-run?
• If we look at Cambium projections, they’re by state as far as I know, so curious where the hourly profile projections for egrid sub regions came from as I haven’t see these available on the eGrid site

Appreciate any insights!

[chris]

Hey @jakechevrier ,

All good questions and I’ll try to answer them all, though some are probably better answered by NREL and some of the docs that NREL put together here pertaining to the measure.

@jakechevrier

When providing a location from an epw, is the component using eGrid regions or state emissions profiles?

Unlike the measure, the component only looks at future carbon emissions scenarios (not historical ones). So all of those come from the eGrid regions where the state is used to map the EPW location to an eGrid region.

@jakechevrier

What is the source for these values in the repository?

For the future scenarios, the NREL docs above say the following:

“Hourly marginal emissions factors for future years are based on the long-run marginal emissions rates for a region’s load (co2_lrmer_enduse) from NREL’s Cambium tool LowRECost scenario.”

@jakechevrier

What projection scenario are these profiles? (mid-case, low renewable cost, high renewable cost, ect…)

I think I answered this above. It seems to be “low renewable cost”.

@jakechevrier

Are these short-run or long-run?

I don’t know what you mean here but you can plug in any even-numbered year ranging from 2020 to 2050 into the component. So I guess both long and short?

@jakechevrier

If we look at Cambium projections, they’re by state as far as I know, so curious where the hourly profile projections for egrid sub regions came from as I haven’t see these available on the eGrid site

I don’t know how they made the future hourly profile but the future scenarios are supposed to be coordinated with Cambium.