Electricity Carbon Calculator
What your electricity emits, using the carbon intensity of your own country's grid.
Emissions
45.83 kg CO2e
- Carbon intensity used
- 458.29 gCO2e/kWh — World, 2025
Where this comes from
- Rule
- Lifecycle carbon intensity of electricity · World, 2025
- Source
- Source updated
- Checked
A kilowatt-hour is not a kilowatt-hour everywhere. The same unit of electricity carries less than a tenth as much carbon in France as it does in Poland, because one grid runs mostly on nuclear power and the other mostly on coal. This uses the figure for the country you pick, never an average across several.
How it works
Kilowatt-hours multiplied by the carbon intensity of the grid, in grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour. That is the whole arithmetic; everything interesting is in the figure it is multiplied by.
The intensity is a **lifecycle** figure, not just what comes out of a chimney. It counts building the power stations, the panels and the turbines, mining and transporting the fuel, and taking it all apart afterwards — which is why wind and nuclear are low rather than zero, and why the numbers look higher than combustion-only figures published elsewhere.
Each country carries the year it was measured, because they are not all current to the same one. Some grids are reported through last year and a few lag by two or three, and putting a single date on the page would misdate the ones behind.
Nothing is averaged across countries and nothing is substituted. If a place is not in the snapshot it is not in the list, rather than being quietly given a neighbour's figure.
Examples
| Case | Input | Result |
|---|---|---|
| A month of household use in France | 250 kWh, France | about 10 kg CO2e |
| The same month in Poland | 250 kWh, Poland | about 147 kg CO2e — fourteen times as much |
| Charging an electric car | 60 kWh, world average | about 27 kg CO2e |
Frequently asked questions
Why is my country's figure from an earlier year than another's?
Because the underlying data does not finish every country at the same time. Most are current to last year; a few lag by two or three. The year travels with each figure rather than one date being put on the page, because that date would be wrong for the ones behind.
Why is nuclear or wind not zero?
Because this is a lifecycle figure. Building a reactor or a wind farm, mining and enriching fuel, moving it, and decommissioning all emit, and that is counted here. Combustion-only figures published elsewhere show zero for both and are measuring something narrower.
Does my green tariff change this?
Not in what this page computes, which is the average of the grid you are physically connected to. Electrons do not follow contracts. A green tariff is a financial arrangement about what gets built, and whether it changes emissions is a genuine argument that a calculator cannot settle.
How often is this updated?
Annually. The snapshot carries both the date the publisher last updated the data and the date its next release is due, taken from the dataset itself rather than guessed here — so the page can tell you how current it is instead of asking you to assume.
Good to know
- An average for a whole country over a whole year. The real intensity swings hour by hour — a still winter evening is far dirtier than a windy afternoon — so this answers what a year of consumption costs in carbon, not what this particular kettle did.