Are Consumers with Low Serving Costs Necessarily Carbon Friendly?

Abstract

To achieve the ambitious carbon neutrality goal, it is important to trace the carbon flow in different sectors, especially in the electricity sector, as it is one of the major carbon emitters. Most of the existing literature focuses on carbon accounting in the power generation and delivery processes. Carbon accounting for the demand side is often overlooked because it is rather challenging to handle a large number of consumers in the system. Also, it is commonly believed that consumers with low serving costs are often carbon friendly, implying that there is not much need to conduct carbon accounting on the demand side. In this paper, we propose a new metric to measure the carbon intensity of each consumer based on its load profile and then examine if the common belief holds in practice. Through extensive comparative study, we conclude the conditions under which consumer’s system serving cost and carbon intensity are positively correlated and further exploit the possible reasons for these conditions.