Overview

The EcoDynElec software is built as an ensemble of modules organized around 3 steps (Figure 1). The preprocessing steps include the download or loading of relevant data, the cleaning and adjustment to the correct time step. The large diversity of data lead to a high number of functions and increased complexity of the data treatment, thus all these functions were gathered in a sub-package called preprocessing. Then the pre-treated data can be used to track electricity “from the socket to the source”, aggregated in ecodynelec as a type of electricity plant in a country. This process outputs the electric mix in a target country, i.e. the decomposition per source of origin of 1kWh of electricity in the target country. Once the electric mix obtained, a third step uses the impact per electricity plant type (impact for this kind of plant to produce 1kWh of electricity) to calculate the overall impact of 1kWh of electricity.

Figure 1: Schematic visualization of different groups of functions in EcoDynElec

A more detailed schema of how the different modules intricate within EcoDynElec is shown in Figure 2

Figure 2: Modules, process and usage of EcoDynElec

The EcoDynElec algorithm can be executed all at once, from downloading the data to computing the environmental impacts. Figure 3 is a schematic overview of how it works.

Figure 3: Overall pipeline of EcoDynElec