Carbon Accounting of Electricity: Managing the Gap between market- and location-based Approaches

Hamburg Institut has been providing research and consulting services in the fields of climate change mitigation and energy system transformation since 2012 with an interdisciplinary team of experts. Both in our daily research and project work with our customers and in our participation in national, European and international standardisation processes, we keep addressing questions related to certification systems and carbon accounting. A much-discussed topic is the gap between the market-based and the location-based approach to handling emissions from electricity purchases. In their current design and practical application, the parallel use of the two approaches represents an obstacle to comparability and, consequently, to the credibility of carbon accounting as a whole. With this paper, we would like to shed more light on the current issues - but above all, we would like to encourage discussion on possible solutions and emphasise the need to harmonise the existing approaches to electricity accounting.