Electricity Calculator Methodology
Electricity:
To calculate user’s home electricity emissions, our calculator first asks all users to choose their location. Every region’s electricity grid has a slightly different efficiency and thus a slightly different emissions factor. Determining your grid helps us to better estimate your total emissions. Grid emissions factor data comes from the IEA.
To calculate the emissions users input the kilowatt hours of energy (kWh) they consume over a certain period of time. The calculator then divides that number by 1,000 to determine the megawatt hours (mWh). To figure out how many pounds of carbon are emitted per hour we multiple the tons of CO2 emitted per mWh (provided by the databases listed above) by a figure of 2.204.6226. This converts tons of carbon per mWh into pounds of carbon per mWh. The last step is to multiple the mWhs by the number pounds of carbon emitted per mWh. This last step determines the total emissions.
