CO2 Account takes into account both the emissions from your home and your various vehicles.

First, your baseline emissions are calculated over a two-year period. As the name implies, these emissions will be used as a reference for calculating your future reductions.

Your CO2 emissions are then calculated every year after the baseline period. These emissions for the year are compared with the baseline emissions. If your emissions fall, you will receive €G on your CO2 account. If your emissions increase, nothing happens.

The value of your reference emissions is reduced each year by 0.37%, according to the calculation method that has been approved by the French government and the UN. According to this method, you will receive 90% of your reductions. Finally, the emission factors, i.e. the quantity of CO2 emitted when you consume a litre of fuel oil, petrol or burn gas, are those used by France to calculate its CO2 emissions, and which can be found in the national greenhouse gas inventory calculated by CITEPA.

We emit CO2 in many ways in our daily lives: when we travel, heat, eat, buy goods and services, etc! CO2 is everywhere and it is sometimes difficult to determine the emissions linked to some of our actions.

The CO2 Account only takes into account emissions from the way you travel in your personal vehicles and the way you heat your home. These emissions account for about half of your CO2 emissions and are relatively easy to calculate and prove.

Les justificatifs demandés servent à deux choses :

• Firstly, to check that the information you give us about your accommodation, vehicles or reduction actions undertaken is accurate.

• Finally, we calculate your CO2 emissions based on your actual fossil fuel consumption. This is why we ask you to provide us with all your fossil fuel consumption data for your home or mileage records for your vehicles.

You may find yourself in a situation where you do not have all the documents that are required to complete your consumption information.

If this is the case, do not hesitate to contact us by e-mail (contact@compteco2.com) to explain your situation, it is sometimes possible to get out of it by providing other documents.

If this is not the case, the easiest thing to do is to delay the calculation of your emissions until you have all the documents in your possession.

Not all energies have the same carbon content. Electricity and wood are considered non-emitting by the CO2 Account methodology. It is therefore possible to carry out energy renovations that will not reduce your CO2 emissions. It is also possible that you will consume more energy than before the work was carried out….

Example 1: You are heated with electricity. You carry out insulation work on your home. This work will help you to reduce your electricity bill. However, as electricity is not taken into account by the CO2 Account, this work will not allow you to receive any CO2 reductions.

Example 2: When you moved house, you switched from fuel to gas heating. You thought you would achieve CO2 reductions. Once your emissions have been validated, you see that you have not made any CO2 savings: the fact that you bought a larger house has cancelled out any reductions you might have made.

If you plan to carry out energy renovation work in the coming years, it will be possible for you to shift the dates of your baseline assessment to calculate your reductions from this work.

Each case is different and you need to know which case you are in:

1) You have misjudged your reduction actions and have in fact not made enough effort to effectively reduce your CO2 emissions.

Example: Carpooling on a one-off basis is not enough to reduce the CO2 emissions linked to the way you travel.

2) The reduction action you took led to a rebound effect that cancelled out the reductions you could have made.

Example :

You have switched from a gas boiler to a gas condensing boiler. Because it costs less to heat your home, you take advantage of this to heat more and end up with the same energy bill as before you changed your boiler.

You have bought a car that uses less fuel than your old car. Without realising it, you drive it more and end up with the same fuel bill as with your old car

3) Some actions inevitably lead to increases in CO2. Generally, this increase in CO2 is linked to a move or the acquisition of a new vehicle. In such a case, the most interesting thing is to shift your baseline balance to take into account the new scope of your emissions.

The failure to take into account emissions from your electricity consumption is not an oversight on the part of the CO2 Account. The production of electricity does emit CO2, although these emissions are relatively low due to the large share of nuclear power generation in France. Thus, one kWh of electricity produced in mainland France emits between 20 and 40 g of CO2. This is a far cry from the 187 g of CO2 emitted by a kWh of natural gas.

But this is not the reason why electricity is not taken into account by our site. More simply, the electricity sector is already subject to a system of quotas (allowances) for its CO2 emissions. Since double counting of CO2 reductions is to be avoided at all costs (as it would not make much sense), CO2 emissions from electricity are not included in the CO2 Account. As a result, CO2 emissions from geothermal energy or heat pumps are also zero.

Wood, which is a highly carbonaceous material, does emit CO2 during its combustion. So why is this energy source considered to be clean in terms of CO2 emissions?

To understand what may seem like a paradox, you have to see wood as a renewable energy source: burning wood does emit CO2, but it is this same CO2 that will allow the growth of the forests that will be used to heat you!

Similarly, the carbon cycle of biomass burning cannot be compared to that of fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel carbon has been stored underground for millions of years and has no impact on the climate until it is burned. It would take millions of years for oil to form again (which would capture carbon from the atmosphere again), whereas a tree grows on a much shorter time scale!

The calculation of your CO2 emissions is based on your actual consumption. It is therefore necessary to be able to provide your fossil fuel consumption for the whole year, which means that this year must be over.

For example, if you are heated by gas, you will receive a gas bill at the beginning of the year which will show your consumption for the second half of the previous year. You will therefore not be able to request validation of your annual consumption for the previous year until you have received this bill.

Compte CO2 does not include electricit in its calculation of CO2 emissions. We cannot therefore take into account this type of work.

The CO2 bonus is paid to CO2 Account holders subject to the use of the card, with at least ten payment card payment transactions recorded in the month, and the use of the account, with account reloading movements of at least 400 euros per month.
The payment of the CO2 bonus is specified in section 2 of our Terms & Conditions, entitled « General Conditions of the Green-Euro Programme », and in particular in its article 2.3, « caveat ».