The grid
Electricity is under 1% of the carbon the annex prices, so a country's grid barely moves its gross border cost. The reason is the regulation, not the statistics: it mostly does not count electricity at all.
Electricity's share of all priced carbon
Country × good values priced
Indirect emissions, the carbon in the electricity the plant drew, are published only for cement and fertilisers. For aluminium and hydrogen the annex carries no indirect column at all, and for iron and steel it is present on 27 of the 6,229 country-specific rows. Where it does count it is small: 5.8% of a cement tonne and 5.5% of a fertiliser one.
Primary aluminium: the gross border cost against the grid
Primary aluminium is made by electrolysis, and the annex publishes no indirect value for it. Across the 30 countries with a primary-aluminium value, Tajikistan has the cleanest grid and carries a gross cost of €140 a tonne while Bahrain has the dirtiest and carries €154 a tonne, with a correlation of -0.06 between the two.
Every product group against the grid
Iron and steel and cement follow the grid somewhat. For steel the priced value is almost entirely direct emissions, so whatever links a country's steel to its grid, it is not the carbon in the electricity. Aluminium does not follow the grid at all.
So what. The priced carbon is overwhelmingly the carbon burned in the process, the coke in a blast furnace and the calcination of limestone, not the carbon behind the meter. A grid factor is the right input to a Scope 2 disclosure and the wrong input to a sourcing decision on steel.
Who acts: whoever is building a supplier-screening or carbon-cost model. Cost of getting it wrong: ranking suppliers on grid data that the gross border cost is almost entirely insensitive to.