Carbon footprint sensor?

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

Hi all,

I have been looking at calculating emissions of CO2Equivalent for my energy consumption and thought the easiest path would be to augment the core energy dashboard and features (at least to test the ideas).

I have made some progress now and thought I’d share here as this thread has some interest on the topic. All the work is currently on a branch in my own repo. It needs to have quite a few tests added and quite a bit of refactoring.

I have added three new cards and some functionality in the energy modules to calculate emissions, offsets (if for example you purchase a “greenpower” energy package that has a guaranteed offset) and avoided/exported (“truly negative” emissions).

I added an “Energy emissions” graph card that is a chart with electrical emissions, offsets and avoided and gas emissions and offsets. An “Emissions table” with the various types of emissions as on the chart and a net emission and an absolute emission for the selected period. There is also an “Emissions gauge” showing net emissions. These all operate on the same period selection as the rest of the energy work.

I have been generating test energy flows on my development environment so it doesn’t match reality and looks a little weird (I will deploy to my home assistant after it is more robust).

The animated gif shows what it looks like on the energy dashboard:

Energy emissions graph and table daily:

Energy emissions graph and table weekly:

Energy emissions graph and table monthly:

My aim in making these changes was to enable me to track my absolute and net emissions accurately as my family looks to stay as close to zero absolute emissions as possible and to be very negative net emissions. I also want it to be usable for others to track their emissions just for understanding or to approach net zero or attempt close to absolute zero.

This currently works very well for all-electric homes and uses CO2 Sensor (as already configured in Energy). I wanted it to work for gas power also (using static conversion for co2equiv). I also added an ability to set the amount of offsets for the source as configuration.

I’ll need input on how to treat gas and appropriate conversions and defaults.

I think fossil-fuel powered vehicle mileage would be good to add also. I don’t even know how people are tracking that currently in home assistant.

I have also starting experimenting with embodied carbon of purchases (which I track separate to home assistant currently). I don’t think home assistant does well as a logger for tracking “manual inputs”. I also think it doesn’t fit in the energy tab anymore in that case (but not sure how it should be rehomed for emissions) so lots of discussion to go there.

Keen for thoughts and feedback and what you’d like to see in this area.

Cheers,
Brody

[c-soft (MK888)]

This is awesome, great work!

First, I think it’s great idea to augument Energy dashboard.
On gas calculations - I found this thread: https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_environmental_impact_of_1m3_of_natural_gas_used_for_heating

Interesting sources and calculations. Summing up - about 2.2 kg of CO2 per m3 of natural gas, but excluding transport/taxation/extraction, which may vary depending on source of the gas (they suggest it can be about 10% but may be more).

Re dashboard - it would be really cool to have visualisation of which activity emits most (just like it already is with energy, split into particular devies).

Hope that helps somehow, awesome work!

[kamaradclimber (Grégoire Seux)]

@brodykenrick

made some progress now and thought I’d share here as this thread has some interest on the topic. All the work is currently on a branch in my own repo. It needs to have quite a few tests added and quite a bit of refactoring.

I would be very interested in testing your changes, do you think it would be ready to be shared?

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

Hi @kamaradclimber ,

Thanks. It is ready for some testing but there is the difficulty that as this is a small change to the backend core (energy API) and the front-end “core” that it isn’t as simple as getting an alpha of a component or card.

So testing would either be (a) a “build it yourself” on your own test environment or (b) installing a development build on your production instance.

I haven’t even worked out how to share the development build to my own production setup.

The changes are quite low risk. There is a basic change to the energy API and the rest is front-end data manipulation. So no risk of corrupting databases etc.

You look to have been around HA for a while would you be interested in either of those testing options?

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

Thanks. I’ll add in some gas defaults based on that and a configuration option.

The emissions are tracked at the “interface” to the grid or gas. I have broken down by their contributions there.

What breakdown are you keen to see? As we can only properly calculate emissions of exports vs imports.

Individual devices are “inside the house” or “behind the meter” and might be sourced by solar, or battery or grid.

I’d be up for the challenge of creating a “how was energy sourced at the time the device was in use with emissions for that” approximation of that is what you are keen to see.

[kamaradclimber (Grégoire Seux)]

@brodykenrick

would you be interested in either of those testing options?

Sure, I’ve never built home-assistant from scratch but that should be doable given the number of contributors on the platform.

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

Thanks - It will be great to have your inputs.

Yes, it is pretty simple to setup the Dev environment. The vscode/docker containers are really easy to get going with.

I’ll read up a little on how to create a build that can be selected/installed easily (as I want to test on my production instance also and need that skillet). That will be more accessible for you and others if I solve it also.

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

Here are the getting started docs for trying to build it from scratch in a Dev environment.

Home Assistant Developer Docs | Home Assistant Developer Docs

Set up Development Environment | Home Assistant Developer Docs.

[kamaradclimber (Grégoire Seux)]

@brodykenrick

a build that can be selected/installed easily

I’m using the home assistant container, I’ll adapt to any distribution you can propose

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

I am currently reworking this whole piece of work to use the recorder/statistics.

I based my code off the fossil fuel proportion calculator but it is more similar to the energy cost in how it should be implemented.

(I won’t get back to this this week - my current unrelated HA challenge taking my time is that I just got twenty aqara ZigBee temperature sensors and as they aren’t properly following the ZigBee check-in/keep-alive they all drop.off after a couple of hours).

[beecho01 (James Beeching)]

I too would be interested. I am looking to do something very similar.

[fonsr (Fons)]

Great stuff. Would also be interested to use this in my setup!
Once it is more robust, can we request it to be implemented in the main HA release?

[Djanini]

Looks great, I was thinking of implementing something like this myself. What is the current status of this project? If possible, I would like to test is and maybe help finalizing it if needed.

[WillS]

@Djanini

Looks great, I was thinking of implementing something like this myself.

The very words I was just about to post. I also will volunteer to test, though it would have to be when the implementation is a little further along, as I could not complete a dev build due to issues with the kernel version I have (and I’m running Ubuntu Studio, which is not in complete sync with the more normative Ubuntu).

I also was thinking that the idea of entering gasoline/diesel gallons/litres would fit very nicely, as I’m already counting the kWh on my PHEV. A separate thread on this would better keep the idea alive, though.

@brodykenrick , can you share the current status of your carbon footprint sensor implementation? I am extremely interested.

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

It is not moving much at all - I have my real time emission measures in place and track externally still for Scope 1,2 and 3 (spreadsheet).

I was planning on coming back to this at some stage though.

My next basic goal is to set up a homeplate/inkplate dashboard and after that is done and I can share dashboards around the house I will come back to this to display emissions on those boards.

[brodykenrick (Brody)]

@WillS

I also was thinking that the idea of entering gasoline/diesel gallons/litres would fit very nicely, as I’m already counting the kWh on my PHEV. A separate thread on this would better keep the idea alive, though.

How, and what, are you tracking here? As another reason for pausing this (other than plain old busy life getting in the way) was I couldn’t find a nice place using home assistant for a manual “logger” (e.g. after a purchase putting a CO2EQ value in to track).

As getting a good way to track scope 2 and 3 emissions in this one place on home assistant is a goal for me (scope 1 emissions are zero for us but I’d love to make that easily visible for all folks for all emissions).

[m1c]

Hi @ryanfobel, This looks very nice. Can you share the details to get this dashboard set up?

Appreciated,

Thanks

[robert_sahakyan (Robert)]

Did you ever find out - as I too would be interested - how to ‘augment’ the default energy dashboard ?

Thanks

[robert_sahakyan (Robert)]

Hi @brodykenrick ,

Could you share how you ‘augmented’ the home assistant’s energy dashboard to have the emissions cards for graph & values?

I am currently working on a custom integration that fetches electricity & gas data, as well as their respective carbon measured in KG. I’ve got it all setup now (have different sensor entities for each metric), and I am able to display the gas & electricity, but I don’t know how to display the carbon within my energy dashboard.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Robert.

[plord (Peter Lord)]

Also very interested in getting this working on my install.

( in fact I rasied an enhancement request Add carbon footprint to energy dashboard just before finding this thread )