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Average
on the mapThe default view. A GO's MWh displaces one MWh of the issuing country's average mix, so the multiple is the ratio of the two grids' intensity.
Emissions · European power grids
Carbon intensity of electricity generation, country by country — every complete year and the latest twelve months — from ENTSO-E and NESO data. Switch to GO abatement and pick a base country to see how much more — or less — a Guarantee of Origin from anywhere else displaces.
Complete calendar years, plus the latest twelve complete months. Hatched: a covered country without complete data for the period; grey: outside the data this site serves.
† Coverage caveat. ENTSO-E's generation_per_type under-represents
distribution-connected generation (rooftop solar, small gas cogeneration), so country totals
undershoot national inventories — Italy is the clearest case: ~57 Mt CO2
here for 2024 versus ~75 Mt in Ember's inventory, because a large share of Italian gas and solar
is embedded. Rankings are largely unaffected; treat absolute Mt for † countries as lower bounds.
See the methodology.
Methodology, drawn
A Guarantee of Origin certifies that one MWh of renewable electricity was produced. What that MWh avoided depends on where — and when — it was produced. Three ways to count it, and two things no index can tell you.
The default view. A GO's MWh displaces one MWh of the issuing country's average mix, so the multiple is the ratio of the two grids' intensity.
A grid's intensity moves through the day, and a solar MWh arrives with the sun. Weighting every hour by what solar — or wind — produced gives the grid that GO really met, and compares a solar GO with a solar GO.
In the short run an extra MWh does not replace the average mix: it pushes back the plant at the margin — usually gas or coal, often across a border. Multiples get much flatter. Doing it properly means finding that plant hour by hour from prices; it is on the roadmap.
How the multiple moves with the basis, for the largest markets.
These are lifecycle intensities, and renewable plants have a lifecycle footprint too. Netting it out barely moves a Polish GO but turns a Norwegian solar GO negative — so the index compares grids, gross.
The index says what an extra MWh would displace. A GO from a plant that runs anyway moves a claim, not a tonne of CO₂; only output your money causes — a PPA that gets a plant built — delivers what the map shows.
Monthly tonnes by fuel for any bidding zone — or pick a zone from a country on the map.
Stacked bars = monthly tCO2 by fuel. Intensity line = kgCO2 per MWh of total generation (the "how clean is this grid right now" number). Months are bucketed in the market's local timezone — DST shifts absorbed cleanly.
Side-by-side stacked bars for up to 4 bidding zones — the cleanest way to see which markets ran on coal and which ran on nuclear during the same months.
How fast the continent is decarbonising, and who is pulling ahead of — or falling behind — the pack.
The bold green line is the generation-weighted average across every covered ENTSO-E bidding zone — the EU plus the UK, Norway, Switzerland, and the Western Balkans. Grey traces are the individual countries — the spread shows how far the cleanest and dirtiest grids sit from the mean — and the one selected on the map is drawn in white. Production-based, lifecycle factors; complete calendar years only.
Each country's intensity measured against the European average for that year — the generation-weighted mean of all covered ENTSO-E zones, EU and non-EU alike. Above 100 = dirtier than the typical European kWh; below 100 = cleaner. This strips out the "everyone decarbonised together" effect, so you can see who is actually pulling ahead of — or falling behind — the pack. The index moves if a country's intensity is flat while peers fall. Pick a country below or on the map to follow it.
Each bubble is a country: how much power it generates (x, log scale), how dirty each kWh is (y), and how much CO2 that adds up to (bubble size). The top-right quadrant — big and dirty — is where GO purchases and PPA-led decarbonisation move the most tonnes. Follows the year selected on the map.
† lower bound — see the coverage caveat under the map.
A Guarantee of Origin certifies that one MWh of renewable electricity was produced in a given country. What that MWh avoided depends on the grid it was fed into: on average it displaces one MWh of that country's generation mix. The multiple compares two such grids:
GO multiple(X vs base) = intensity(X) ÷ intensity(base)
with intensity the period's production-based lifecycle figure on the map (g CO2e/kWh = kg CO2e per MWh, so per GO). A GO from a country at 4× abates four times what a GO from the base does. The drawings in How the GO index works walk through it.
Hour-matched basis (Solar GO, Wind GO). A grid's intensity changes hour by hour, and a solar or wind MWh only arrives in the hours that technology produces. The hour-matched intensity weights every hour's grid intensity by what the technology produced in it — the country's hour, all its bidding zones summed — and the multiple then compares like with like, a solar GO with a solar GO. Solar is ENTSO-E B16 (and NESO's solar); wind is B18, B19 and NESO's two wind series.
Isolar = Σh solarh × Ih ÷ Σh solarh, Ih = emissionsh ÷ generationh
What it is not. Both bases are average-emissions, location-based views. It does not model the marginal plant an extra MWh displaces — usually gas or coal, often across a border, which makes clean grids' GOs worth more than their average suggests. It ignores the certificate's own lifecycle footprint (11–48 g/kWh depending on technology), which weighs only against the very cleanest grids. And it says nothing about additionality: a GO from a plant that would run anyway changes nobody's dispatch. Read it as a comparison of grids, not a claim about any one certificate.
IPCC AR5 Working Group III, Annex III (2014) — lifecycle median emission factors in gCO2eq/kWh, applied per ENTSO-E PSR code. These are the academic-LCA consensus medians; other public dashboards (Electricity Maps, Ember, EEA) use their own factor sets — most are broadly consistent with AR5 but you will not match them digit-for-digit.
Production-based: emissions are attributed to the bidding zone where generation occurs. Cross-border traded electricity is attributed to the producing zone, not the consuming one. Consumption-based / flow-tracing attribution (what Electricity Maps shows on its live map) is on the roadmap as a separate view.
AR5 factors include upstream fuel cycle, plant construction, and decommissioning, so numbers here will exceed published direct combustion inventories (e.g. RTE, UBA, Eurostat) by 20–60 % in low-fossil zones. Same ranking, different absolute level. If you need direct-combustion totals for compliance reporting, use the Member-State inventory.
The AR5 sustainable-forestry lifecycle median. Operational combustion is biogenic-neutral by IPCC convention; the lifecycle factor captures upstream silviculture and processing. Co-firing and wood-pellet feedstocks run materially higher (up to ~740). Treat 230 as a lower-bound for the EU biomass mix.
Lower-bound fossil-fraction approximation. EU municipal-solid-waste typically averages closer to 500 once plastic content is properly counted; full range in the literature is 330–700+. Note: in the res_share derivation, B17 counts as renewable (ENTSO-E's source-substrate taxonomy). Here it emits at the fossil-fraction factor. Both views are intentional.
Pumped storage (B10), energy storage (B25), transmission assets (B21–B24), "other" (B20), and unknown PSR codes (B99) carry no factor — no primary combustion at the asset itself, and pricing storage dispatch would double-count emissions already attributed to the source fuel that charged it.
ENTSO-E Transparency Platform generation_per_type for every zone except Great Britain (PT15M for most zones; aggregated to hourly via average MW × 1 hour before multiplying by the factor, so the result is faithful regardless of whether the source publishes in quarters, half-hours, or full hours).
ENTSO-E stopped publishing GB generation on 2021-06-15 (post-Brexit), so GB uses the NESO Data Portal generation mix (half-hourly, 2009 → now) for all years — one consistent source, no mid-2021 splice; the two sources agree within ~0.3% on comparable fuels over their overlap. NESO includes modelled estimates of embedded (distribution-connected) solar and wind — the generation that is invisible to ENTSO-E everywhere else — so GB totals sit closer to the national inventory than other zones, at the price of those two components being estimates rather than meterings. NESO's wind splits by connection level, not technology: transmission-connected wind (~75–80% offshore) takes the AR5 offshore median, embedded wind the onshore median. Net interconnector imports and net storage discharge are excluded, same as storage everywhere else. Supported by National Energy SO Open Data.
Ireland and Northern Ireland trade as one Single Electricity Market (bidding zone IE_SEM), so the map draws Northern Ireland with Ireland, and Great Britain's figure is GB only.
A country's year is shown only when every one of its bidding zones has twelve complete months; sub-zones are summed into their country (Italy has seven). Last 12 months is the twelve most recent complete months — a month counts once it ended at least ten days ago, so late publishers have landed — under the same rule; its "change" compares it with the twelve months before. The map's data is recomputed when new generation lands and served from a stored snapshot, so it is there at once.
ENTSO-E aggregated generation-per-type captures generation visible to the TSO; distribution-connected and self-consumed plants below the platform's reporting thresholds — chiefly rooftop solar PV and small gas cogeneration — are under-represented (EC review of the Transparency Platform). Production-based totals here therefore fall short of national power-sector inventories, and the gap is widest in markets with a large distributed/cogeneration fleet. Italy is the clearest case: summed across all seven Italian bidding zones (IT_NORD, IT_CNOR, IT_CSUD, IT_SUD, IT_CALA, IT_SICI, IT_SARD), 2024 lands at ~57 Mt CO2 here versus ~75 Mt in Ember's inventory. Transmission-connected fuels match (our 2024 wind ≈ 22 TWh and coal ≈ 8 TWh track Terna), but landed gas (~94 TWh) and solar (~28 TWh) fall short of Terna's ~115 TWh and 36 TWh — the per-MWh factors are right, the missing piece is distributed generation. A country total must sum every one of a country's bidding zones; Italy has seven. Countries marked † on the map, ranking, and scatter carry this caveat.
Country shapes from Natural Earth (public domain), drawn in the EU's equal-area projection (ETRS89-LAEA), so no country looks bigger — or dirtier — than it is.