Grid Generation & Consumption Mix Explorer
Life-cycle emission factors for US balancing authorities, hour by hour. About this tool — methodology, assumptions, verification and sources.
What this is for
To give life-cycle practitioners a defensible hourly carbon intensity for the US grid — one where the accounting boundary is chosen deliberately rather than inherited, every figure traces back to the process it came from, and the limits are stated rather than left to be discovered.
The same grid yields different, equally correct numbers depending on what you are asking. A region that generates cleanly can consume dirtily, and a factor that is right for a corporate inventory is wrong for a claim about additional renewables. Choosing the boundary is the work; this tool makes the choice explicit and shows what it costs.
The boundaries themselves are set out at the foot of this page — the hourly ones built here and the annual ones published by eLCI.
Click a region on the map. The panel beside it plots that region on whichever boundary you select, and the kg CO₂e / MWh toggle switches between the carbon and the energy behind it — the two are the same hours seen through different weights.
Select a region on the map to see its factors plotted.
Hourly, from this project
Built hour by hour from EIA-930, so they follow the grid as it actually ran. EIA-930 ↗
- Hourly generation
- What was generated inside the region this hour. No imports, no losses — the narrowest boundary and the one with the least assumption in it.
- Hourly consumption
- What was consumed here, following imports one hop to whoever generated them. This is eLCI's own method applied to observed hourly flows.
- Hourly consumption, multi-hop
- The same flows solved as a network: power reaching you through a neighbour takes the emission factor of whoever actually generated it, not the neighbour's. For import-dependent regions this differs from the line above by up to 160%.
- Hourly consumption, at user
- Carried from the transmission system to the socket. Every unit lost on the way still had to be generated, so intensity per unit delivered is higher — 2.5% to 4.2% depending on the region. This is the boundary an end user actually consumes at.
Annual, published by eLCI
Fixed for a release by eLCI, so they do not track recent change — but they are the citable figures. eLCI ↗
- Generation mix
- The annual version of the generation basis.
- Consumption mix, at grid
- Imports included, measured where power leaves the transmission system.
- Consumption mix, at user
- The same, carried to the socket — transmission and distribution losses included, so the number is higher.
- Residual mixes
- What is left after contracted renewables are claimed by their buyers. If someone else holds the certificate for that wind farm, you cannot also count it; this is the boundary that says so.
Boundary. Attributional average at balancing-authority scale — not marginal, and not supplier- or contract-specific. Busbar unless the framing says otherwise. Assumptions · Sources · Built from EIA-930 · eLCI · eGRID
Disclaimer. Academic project. US Government data used responsibly; outputs used at your own risk, with no responsibility or liability accepted. Opinions are my own and reflect no position of my employer.