# Assessing the Carbon Intensity of e-fuels Production in European Countries: A Temporal Analysis
## 3 Results & Discussion
### Time-Series of the Electricity Mix and Its Carbon Footprint  
The time-series of the electricity mix and its carbon intensity has been produced for all countries that are members of the ENTSO-E. This covers 35 countries, including all Member States of the European Union, except Malta and Cyprus, which do not belong to or provide data for the ENTSO-E. Figure 8 presents the electricity dashboard for Italy, Germany, and Austria; these were chosen to illustrate interesting and dissimilar cases. For all the other countries, the figures are available at the following github repository. For display purposes only, the data represented in the figures were resampled using the daily mean for better readability of the graph, but all data were calculated with an hourly resolution. The various subplots present the following:  
* The production mix of electricity in the country: The energy categories were grouped to limit the number of energy categories to represent. Except for the grouping, those data directly come from the ENTSO-E data and do not involve any modelling or calculation;  
Figure 7: Carbon intensity by electricity sources. The consumption mix of electricity: Those data are the outcome of the tracking algorithm. They correspond to the output of a model assuming no preference in direction and energy type in exchanges between countries (i.e., countries are always exchanging electricity corresponding to their domestic mix);
* The power balance is also represented;
* The carbon intensity, per unit of electricity, of the production electricity mix. To ease the readability, the same colours are used as for the above graph;
* The carbon intensity of the consumption electricity mix, per unit of electricity;
* A comparison of the carbon intensity of the production and consumption electricity mix, as well as the limit for the used grid electricity to produce low-carbon hydrogen. For the last three graphs, the left axis gives the values in gCO\({}_{2}\)eq/kWh while the right axis gives the values in gCO\({}_{2}\)eq/MJ of electricity. Figure 8 shows that, for instance, Italy consumes nuclear electricity, whereas Italy does not produce nuclear electricity. This is because Italy imports a significant amount of electricity from France and Switzerland, where nuclear is significant in the national electricity mix. The graph for Italy shows that all over the year, Italy is importing electricity to satisfy a demand that is higher than the national production. In August, the electricity demand reduced and imports were at the lowest level. When looking at the previous graph, it also corresponds to the moment when the consumption of nuclear electricity was also at the lowest level. Figure 8 also shows that Germany's consumption mix includes a share of nuclear and hydroelectricity, which contribute to the reduction in its carbon intensity. It is also interesting to note that there is seasonality in electricity exchange. Germany exports electricity to neighbours globally in winter when electricity production relies more on fossil fuels and has a higher carbon intensity. It also globally imports electricity during the summer, which reduces the use of fossil fuel plants. These aspects explain why the consumption mix in Germany has a slightly lower carbon intensity than its production mix. Even if the share of renewables is high during some periods, the remaining share of electricity produced from fossil fuels prevents it from reaching the 18 gCO\({}_{2}\)eq/MJ limit. Austria was also chosen for illustration purposes since, in comparison to Italy or Germany, its electricity mix sometimes reaches the threshold. Figure 8 shows that, in the absence of production from fossil fuels, the carbon intensity of the electricity production mix in Austria is very low. However, in winter, when the electricity consumption increases, Austria becomes a net importer of electricity with high-carbon intensity. During those periods, this imported consumption of fossil electricity leads to a significant increase in carbon intensity.