Quantification and Surrogate Model Estimation of Spatial-Temporal Carbon Intensity Factors

Daniel R. Bayer, Jonas Schiller, Thanh Mai Pham, Marco Pruckner

The transition toward sustainable urban infrastructure is driving a rapid increase in distributed energy resources, particularly among prosumers equipped with solar photovoltaic (PV) installations. Such PV systems are highly dependent on solar radiation, which fluctuates over time and across different city districts, leading to substantial spatial and temporal variations in local carbon intensity factors. The carbon intensity factor is a critical parameter for optimizing energy consumption and reducing emissions in context of smart building control, electric vehicle charging or district heating systems. Hence, high-resolution information on local carbon intensity factors is crucial for intelligent control strategies that minimize environmental impact across urban infrastructures. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for calculating spatially and temporally resolved carbon intensity factors on an urban district level. The results show that, even within a single city, these factors range from 0 up to 316 g/kWh for an exemplary summer noon. We further develop a transferable surrogate model that estimates these factors using only a limited set of input parameters, typically available to municipalities or grid operators, aligned with census grid cell information. For the surrogate model we compare both traditional decision tree based methods and a state of the art neural network architecture. Our findings demonstrate that the surrogate model can provide highly accurate estimations, particularly in densely built urban areas, supporting data-driven sustainable city operations and indicating transferability even to regions with limited available information. A case study further reveals that neglecting local variations can lead to emission estimation errors of up to 9% for an exemplary building.