What are market groups?
Since the release of ecoinvent 3.2 of version 3 of the ecoinvent database features market groups, a new type of dataset that facilitates the readability. Market groups exist for a selection of continents (North America, Europe), countries (Canada, United States, China) and products (electricity high and medium voltage, heat, natural gas). They allow to hide a level of details that might be overwhelming to basic users, without depriving more advanced users to have access to them. The LCIA results after linking are in both cases identical. This change is purely graphical to make the use of the database easier for the users.
For example, instead of being connected to about 30 small inputs of electricity from every European country, a European dataset will tap into one market group for European electricity, representing the total electricity consumption. If the users are interested to know what proportion of electricity comes from each country, they can refer to the market group dataset.
The figure is a graphical representation of the electricity, medium voltage supplying the sodium sulphite production in Europe.
While in ecoinvent 3.01 and 3.1 the user would see all the individual European markets supplying electricity to this production in ecoinvent 3.2 and subsequent releases the user would see only the "market group for electricity, medium voltage" / RER supplying the electricity.
What does the version number of the database mean?
What is an activity in ecoinvent version 3?
What are global background activities and where do they come from?
What is a market and how is it created?
In which situations are direct activity links used?
Why is the reference product of the treatment activities negative?
Why is the amount of the reference product changing?
What is linking and what happens during the linking process? Attributional System Model
What is linking and what happens during the linking process? Consequential System Model
What is allocation at the point of substitution (APOS)?
What do the shortcuts, such as CH, RER, RoW and GLO mean?
The ecoinvent database in Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs)
What does it mean, when the production volume of an activity is zero?
Why is the “Allocation, default” system model not available in the ecoquery anymore?
How do I calculate the amount of transport in the market?
What is the Rest-of-the-World (RoW) and how is it calculated?
Why is the LCIA score of a certain product negative?
What are the UUID numbers and how do they work?
How to interpret the uncertainty fields in ecoinvent?
What are the LCIA methods ecoinvent is publishing the impact assessment results for?
APOS: why do I have carrots on my recycled aluminium?