Flow-tracing
How Electricity Maps accounts for imports and exports in the electricity mix.
Electricity Maps uses the flow-tracing methodology to compute the electricity mix and derived signals (renewable energy percentage, carbon intensity, ...) that accurately represent the electricity available on a grid accounting for domestic generation and electricity flows with neighboring grids.
For all signals computed based on the electricity mix, a parameter (that can be called flowtraced or breakdownType depending on the endpoint) can be used to receive data computed on either the domestic generation mix or the calculated flow-traced mix.
Example: If the carbon intensity is computed using the production mix, it represents the amount of emissions for each unit of electricity produced. It does not represent the carbon intensity of electricity available to consumers on the grid. If the carbon intensity is computed using the flow-traced electricity mix, it represents the amount of emissions for each unit of electricity consumed, taking into account all electricity flows across interconnected grids. Sometimes, a significant share of grid emissions come from imported electricity.