Carbon intensity is a way of measuring how clean electricity is. Or, more precisely, how many grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) are released to produce a kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity.
The electricity that powers a grid comes from a variety of sources such as fossil fuel based (oil, gas, coal), renewables (e.g. solar, wind ) or nuclear. Electricity that's generated using fossil fuels is more carbon intensive, as the process by which it's generated creates CO2 emissions.
Its important to know the specific fuel mix of each country, specially as several carbon reporting standards and tooling use such average intensity data. We posted one example in 2021 "Innovative tool evaluates the Carbon Footprint of any website".
The Green Web Foundation - a not-for-profit organisation in the Netherlands - has just released a new version of the CO2.js library with the latest average grid intensity data from Ember and from the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). It also expands the number of countries for which average grid intensity data is available, making the calculations much more robust. Carbon intensity was also released per regions and country groups:
Africa 483.78
Asia 531.78
Europe 298.01
G20 440.39
Latin America & Caribbean 238.27
Middle East 514.89
Oceania 446.65
OECD 338.75
World 435.99
The BRICS, as a reference: Brazil is 102.411, Russia 367.189, India 632.406, China 530.214 and South Africa 709.002
And a few other countries: Indonesia 623.281, Australia 503.179, United States 367.768, Chile 333.173, Spain 217.373, Canada 125.55, Switzerland 45.622, Norway 28.818 and Congo (DRC) 25.362
Open data, accessible to all developers, empower to build tools and raise awareness through specific carbon estimates. Below a few great references by the Green Web Foundation:
If you click at the image below, you can access EMBER Data Catalogue.
