Life-cycle carbon-footprint accounting of regional power systems: A production-consumption framework

Abstract

In interconnected regional power grids, electricity generation, transmission, and final consumption are often spatially separated, making local-generation-based accounting insufficient for allocating life-cycle carbon responsibility. Taking Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hainan within China Southern Power Grid as the regional context, this paper develops a production-consumption life-cycle carbon-footprint accounting framework. The framework distinguishes emissions attributed to local generation from those attributed to final electricity use, and integrates local generation portfolios, final-use source shares, interprovincial electricity exchange, transmission losses, and transmission-and-distribution facility footprints. Using publicly available 2024 electricity statistics and electricity carbon-footprint factors, the proposed equations are applied to calculate sample production-side and consumption-side factors for the five provinces. The results show that production-side factors mainly follow local generation portfolios, while consumption-side factors are reshaped by imported electricity and transmission-related footprints. Guangdong’s consumption-side factor is lower than its production-side factor because imported electricity contains a high clean-energy share, whereas Guangxi and Hainan show smaller divergences. The framework supports regional carbon-responsibility allocation, clean-electricity evaluation, and interprovincial compensation design.