Development of a Web-based application for analysis and visualization of CO2 emissions of european power systems

Abstract

Climate change is the foremost concern that is demanding the attention of the world to take strategic actions to combat the adverse effects. Countries around the globe are passing amendments to monitor global warming. CO2 emissions are at alarming levels. According to the International Energy Agency, the electricity sector contributes to nearly 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. With an ever-rising demand for electricity and to meet technological innovations, production plants are producing larger amounts of electricity. For decades, fossil fuels are the major source of electricity generation, causing higher amounts of CO2 emissions. To take important measures in reducing the CO2 emissions, there is a need for an accountable framework and platform that provide intuitive and critical data for CO2 assessment. Currently, most of the existing platforms take emissions from a production plant into consideration. However, the production of electricity is to meet consumer requirements that make consumers share equal responsibility for emissions. In order to take consumers' demand into account, few methods are proposed and are currently in use. One of them is power flow tracing, a method that traces the origin of power generated at the consumer end. In this thesis, we use power flow tracing methodology to account for the CO2 emissions due to consumption of power. This dashboard also provides users additional data associated with electricity like production values due to different generation techniques, imports and exports of the country, and the price trend of electricity. For a better assessment, support for the comparison between two countries helps in evaluating the performance of each country.