To answer this question is the mission of electricityMap.org, an open source project initiated by Olivier Corradi. ElectricityMap aggregates real-time data about the electricity composition of countries and visualizes it on a world map. The greener the color, the more climate-friendly the electricity. At any given time you can see the carbon footprint of a country’s electricity with details on percentages of all sources — such as wind, solar, coal, gas and nuclear. It also contains data of electricity imports and exports between countries. There are two main metrics: the shares of renewable and low-carbon sources. Low-carbon sources includes nuclear next to renewables.

Where does the data come from?

It is provided by Transmission System Operators (TSOs). In the case of EU countries, the data is provided by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). Other world regions have TSOs as well, but in many cases countries don’t have report obligations which are as strict as within the EU. The data on electricityMap is always at least newer than two hours. If the data frequency is worse, a country is greyed out. To learn more about how it works, which potential it has and how you can help improve it, you can watch the conversation i had with Olivier in the video above.

3. How can we use this data to smartly consume green electricity?

The first step is to have a smart meter installed in your home. Smart meters allow households to monitor their electricity usage and prices in real-time. In recent years, they are more commonly offered by electricity providers. The EU plans to replace 80% of all meters with smart meters by this year [Source]. You can also find learnings about smart metering inside the EU here.

Barry, a danish electricity provider, already uses the API which electricityMap provides. Its customers — who have a smart meter installed — can now see in their app how green their regional electricity is at any given moment and make their choices accordingly. Octopus Energy, an energy provider in the UK, built an Amazon Alexa integration using predictions from the Carbon Intensity API, so you can ask Alexa questions like:

“Alexa: what time is the lowest carbon intensity today?”

4. How can we automate smart energy consumption?

Some newer household appliances already integrate the necessary hardware which allows them to talk to your smart meter. To facilitate the communication between such devices, IoT solutions are on the rise. EEBUS for example, a non-profit association, offers a standardised protocol, which enables such communication independently of manufacturers.

5. Can consuming green energy also save money?

It depends on the electricity costs in your country. In Denmark for example, there is roughly a 70% to 80% correlation of electricity prices and greenhouse gas emissions, according to Olivier. In this case, saving money can go hand in hand with reducing emissions or these two goals are at least not contrary. In other countries, this might not be the case but since renewable energy is expected to become cheaper and more competitive, these goals will most probably align even more in the future [Source].

6. How will the next years look like and where should be our focus?

Here is my guess for a realistic outlook for the next years.

Households

I imagine that we will increasingly be able to control our washing machines, dishwashers etc. via apps and we will be able to configure our preferences. I believe that the price will be the major factor for most people, but climate-friendly constraints will be offered. A configuration could sound like this:

“Run the dishwasher today when the price is cheap (objective) while ideally the grid is greener than average (constraint 1) and finish it before 6pm (constraint 2).”

Our focus should be on the most power hungry devices where scheduling makes sense. In the future, a new major electricity consumer in households might be electric cars.

Electric cars

An electric car charging. [Image Source]

I believe that charging electric cars present a unique challenge in this context, especially because charging speed and timing also depend on the local network load, e.g. when many other cars simultaneously charge in your neighbourhood. Furthermore, it also depends on people’s preference between fast chargers and slower battery degradation. But car batteries could also help improve the renewable energy market by using them to store green energy and feeding it into the grid to balance out shortages (vehicle 2 grid). To understand this matter more, i will conduct an interview with an industry expert later this month. Subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to notice when it is published.

Industry

Industry is responsible for about two-thirds of the emissions from electricity generation and therefore for should be at the forefront in this discussion.

In the above interview, Olivier suggested some use cases where companies have a purely economic incentive to become more green. The expansion of data centers worldwide for example has an increasing electricity footprint. In the case where renewable energy is cheaper than non renewable energy, companies can save money by moving big computations to countries where for example the wind blows and therefore electricity is cheaper.

In industry however, climate-friendly efforts often face the Jevons paradox, a complex term which basically just means that when some technological progress or new policy helps to reduce the resources needed to produce a product, instead of using less resources, a company increases its output. In this context it could mean that many companies, who use smart metering to lower electricity costs, will use more electricity because they figured out how to consume it cheaper.

What are your ideas on the topic? Where do you see potential and challenges? Comment below!

Paul