Country Profiles: Data Sources & Methodology
Energy transitions are slow, and hence their analysis requires high-quality data that is comparable across both countries and time.
With this in mind, I set out to compile generation, direct emissions and price data over 50 years (1971-2020) for the 30 advanced high-income countries for which I provide Country Profiles on this site.
I refer to these countries as the “OECD-30” because much of the data is from the international organization to which they belong, the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), and its affiliate, the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Generation Data
All generation data is sourced from the IEA. On their website the IEA generally makes freely available aggregate-level generation data for most of its member-countries from 1990. More disagragate-level data, starting from 1960, is available by subscription, which I purchased for this project. I aggregated the 50+ forms of generation into seven groups, based on IEA categories:
1) nuclear
2) hydro and geothermal
3) wind and solar
4) natural gas
5) petroleum products
6) coal products
7) biomass and waste
To control for aggregate generation changes over time within a country and to standardize for country size differences, I present these in percentage terms in each of the country profiles.
Price Data
All price data is sourced from the IEA. The IEA does not make freely available any price data. The IEA, however, does make available residential and industrial electricity prices from 1978 by subscription, which I purchased for this project. Prices are provided net of or inclusive of general taxes and specific levies. For the Country Profiles I present residential prices inclusive of all such taxes and livies.
To control for inflation witihin a country, I calculate real (constant) 2015 electricity prices by deflating current prices by the country’s general CPI. For cross-country comparabilty, I use the 2015 USD/PPP exchange rate for all years. Hence, the electricity prices are expressed in constant 2015 USD/MWh with 2015 PPP conversion factors.
Emissions Data
The IEA provides emmissions estimates from 1990 that combines electricity generation and public heat. For this project I am interested only in electricity. Therefore I had to find another data source that provided miore disaggragate data.
As part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the “Annex I Parties” have been required from 1990 to submit National Inventory Reports (NIR) that provide detailed descriptive and numerical information on all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals. The UNFCCC format, however, generally provides more disagragate data: 1) for electricity only, 2) combined heat and power (CHP) and 3) heat only (mostly in the form of district heating systems). In this context, I included emissions associated with 1) and calculated electricity-related emissions from 2).
To control for differences over time and country differences I present sector emissions intensity (kg CO2/MWh). From an accounting perspective, so as to not “double count”, the UNFCCC does not allocate emissions from the generation of electricity from the combustion of biomass to electricity (the Energy Sector), but rather to the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector. For this analysis, given that I am focussing on the electricity sector only, and not the economy as a whole, I include emissions from the generation of electricity from the combustion of biomass to the electricity sector.