Scope 2 emissions

The GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance (2015) defines scope 2 as indirect emissions from the generation of purchased or acquired electricity, steam, heat or cooling consumed by the reporting company. The emissions occur at the power plant, but the company reports them because its consumption caused them. Fuel burned in the company's own boilers and generators is scope 1.

The guidance sets two methods. The location-based method multiplies consumption by the average emission intensity of the grid where the consumption takes place. The market-based method uses emission factors from the contractual instruments the company chose: energy attribute certificates such as guarantees of origin, direct contracts such as PPAs, supplier-specific emission rates and, where none of these apply, the residual mix, which is the emission rate left after all claimed attributes are taken out of the system. A company with operations in markets where such instruments exist must report both results and label each one. The guidance calls this dual reporting.

An instrument counts in the market-based result only if it meets the Scope 2 Quality Criteria in Table 7.1 of the guidance. It must carry the emission rate of the generation it represents, be the only instrument that claims that generation, be tracked and canceled by or for the reporting company, be issued and canceled as close as possible to the period of consumption, and come from the same market as the consumption. A supplier-specific factor must be based on the electricity actually delivered, and renewable output whose attributes were sold separately counts at the residual mix. If no adjusted residual mix is available, the company has to disclose that.

ESRS E1, adopted in Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/2772, requires companies reporting under the European Sustainability Reporting Standards to disclose gross location-based and gross market-based scope 2 emissions in tonnes of CO2 equivalent (paragraph 49). Application requirement AR 45 refers to the GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance and its quality criteria and asks for the share and types of contractual instruments used. It allows a separate figure for the share linked to guarantees of origin or renewable energy certificates and keeps carbon credits and emission allowances out of scope 2. Which companies report under ESRS, and from which year, changed with the Omnibus amendments, including Directive (EU) 2026/470; check the current scope. On July 3, 2026 the Commission adopted revised, simplified ESRS that replace Annexes I and II of Regulation 2023/2772. Once they pass scrutiny by Parliament and Council they apply to financial years starting on or after January 1, 2027, with early use allowed for 2026, so paragraph numbers in E1 will change.

In Poland, Article 5(6a) of the Energy Law requires every electricity supplier to tell its customers the fuel mix behind the electricity it sold in the previous year, and where to find information on the environmental impact of that generation, at least CO2 emissions and radioactive waste. That disclosure is one possible input for a supplier-specific factor; whether it meets the quality criteria has to be checked case by case. The GHG Protocol ran a public consultation on revising the Scope 2 Guidance from October 20, 2025 to January 31, 2026. Until a revised version is published, the 2015 text applies.

Scope 2 is a calculation over data that a procurement or energy management platform usually already holds. To produce numbers an auditor will accept, the system needs:

• Activity data per site and month, or finer: kWh consumed, taken from invoices or meter data, with the source of each number recorded.
• Two parallel calculations with separate emission factor tables, each versioned by year and source, so that last year's report can be reproduced after the factors are updated.
• A link between instruments and consumption: which guarantees of origin were canceled, for which site, period and volume, and in which country they were issued.
• Residual mix factors per country and year, and a flag where none is available.
• PPA volumes counted in the market-based result only to the extent that the attributes pass to the buyer under the PPA.
• Aggregation without double counting. Contracts often contain summary or total rows, and the calculation must skip them or the emissions are counted twice.
• Clear units. Factors usually come in kg CO2 per MWh, while the report needs tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Enerace.Online, the procurement platform we build for Enerace, shows clients the carbon footprint of their energy next to their contracts and market data. In 2024 we rebuilt its carbon footprint module in the backend and frontend. In 2025 we stopped summary (TOTAL) rows in contracts from being counted twice in the footprint.