Time-aware life cycle inventories for electricity consumption

Software package shrecc is designed to handle electricity mix data across European countries, using data from the Energy-Charts API. With an increasing share of renewable energy in electricity mixes, environmental impact varies by hour, day and season – which is not systematically accounted for in LCA. To remediate this, shrecc prepares live-tracked electricity data for use with the brightway package, enabling more accurate life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). Through a case study of electric vehicle charging, we demonstrate the importance of temporally granular data. Our findings reveal that relying on annual average electricity mixes can lead to both over- and underestimation of LCIA results, highlighting the need for more time-aware approaches in energy related life cycle assessments.