Add More Accurate Custom Electricity Emissions Estimate

[MisterClean]

TLDR
We live on the greatest grid in America 🇺🇸💪. The building scorecards in Electrify Chicago are misleading. The actual emissions factor for buildings is significantly cleaner than the PJM-wide average.

User story
As a user I would like an accurate representation of electricity emissions on Electrify Chicago building scorecards.

Problem
Electricity emissions reported by the city rely on an environmental report from ComEd which misrepresents the generation mix of the grid that ComEd buys power from.

This disclosure report uses the overall total generation mix of the PJM balancing authority, a grid spanning 14 states.

Historically, before ComEd joined PJM in 2004, the region of northern Illinois was its own balancing authority with a control center in Oak Brook. As its own balancing authority, ComEd imported very little power from other regions. It planned sufficient capacity (largely from nuclear) to run independently from the surrounding regions.

The physical grid that ComEd built as a regulated vertical utility is the one that post-2004 ComEd, the franchise transmission and distribution company, exists on today.

As such, we generate and consume a TON of low-carbon nuclear power, importing very little electricity from neighboring regions.

PJM Illinois Reporting
Each year, PJM releases an infrastructure report that summarizes the generation mix and CO2 emissions within their region of Illinois. In 2023, the mix was 73.7% nuclear. Tack on wind and solar and it gets you up to around 81% clean generation. The CO2 emissions were around 305lbs / mwh (137g / kWh).

Here’s the wild part. On the consumption side of the grid, the ComEd region averages 10.6 gigawatts of load annually (grid status), which is lower than the average generation. We export every minute of the year to the wider PJM and MISO grids.

That is the underpinning behind this statement from ComEd in a 2022 blog post

ComEd's service territory is a national leader in clean energy: In 2022, enough clean energy was available to meet 96 percent of our customers' consumption on an hour-by-hour basis.

Proposal
Build a new "Electrify Chicago Estimate" that augments the reporting from the city.

Calculate the emissions factor using EIA generator pollution reporting, and combine that with the reported electricity consumption from the city that lands in the database as kBtu.