Speaker
Description
Highlights / Discussion Points
Shrecc is an open-source Python package that creates time-aware electricity mix databases for Brightway using live-tracked electricity data from the Energy-Charts API for 45 European countries.
The tool allows LCA practitioners to move beyond annual average electricity mixes by integrating hourly electricity data into Brightway 2 and 2.5 projects, enabling more accurate LCIA results.
The presentation will showcases how shrecc processes production, trade, and demand data to generate low-voltage electricity consumption inventories compatible with ecoinvent.
A small case study on electric vehicle charging demonstrates that annual average electricity mixes can both overestimate and underestimate environmental impacts compared to temporally resolved electricity data.
Shrecc promotes transparent and reproducible LCA practice through its open-source MIT license, GitLab versioning, and direct integration with the Brightway ecosystem.
Concise Description
The increasing share of renewable and intermittent electricity sources in Europe means that electricity mixes now vary significantly by hour, day, and season. In LCA, electricity inventories are still often based on annual averages, which can lead to over- or underestimation of environmental impacts, especially for electricity-dependent applications. We present shrecc, a Python software package designed to create time-aware electricity inventories for LCA by using live-tracked electricity data from the Energy-Charts API for most European countries.
Shrecc is built to integrate directly with the Brightway framework and can generate hourly-resolved electricity mix databases compatible with Brightway 2 and 2.5. The package consists of three main modules: shrecc.download, shrecc.treatment, and shrecc.database. It processes production, trade, and load data, converts electricity mixes to low-voltage datasets, and matches them with ecoinvent processes. Documentation is publicly available at: https://shrecc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
.
The contribution reflects the “Brightcon spirit” by promoting transparency, reproducibility, and open collaboration in LCA practice. Shrecc enables users to move beyond static annual electricity averages and create reproducible, temporally resolved life cycle inventories directly within Brightway projects. The project also provides pre-calculated hourly datasets and is designed to be easy to use and adaptable for future development by the LCA community.
Publications
Bednářová, S., Gibon, T., Benetto, E. (2026). Variability of Electricity Mixes: Does Using a Time-Aware Database Make a Difference? How Timing of Electric Vehicle Charging Influences LCA Results. In: Traverso, M., Mankaa, R.N., Bonaffini, D., Covais, A. (eds) Life Cycle Management from Global to Local . Springer, Cham. https://doi-org.proxy.bnl.lu/10.1007/978-3-032-17987-6_4
Bednářová, S., Gibon, T., & Benetto, E. (2025). Time-aware life cycle inventories for electricity consumption. SoftwareX, 32, 102362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2025.102362
shrecc on Git
https://git.list.lu/shrecc_project/shrecc
| How much time do you ideally wish for your contribution? | 15 min (Presentation, slides; Presentation, with notebook) |
|---|