The electric power industry plays a pivotal role in carbon emission control. Accurate and real-time accounting of carbon emissions in the power industry is essential for supporting the carbon reduction of the power industry. At present, the measurement of carbon emissions in the power industry relies mainly on direct measurement or the accounting methods, which often struggles to balance low measurement costs with real-time accuracy. Therefore, in this paper, the robust power data infrastructure in the power industry is leveraged and the correlation between electricity consumption and carbon emissions is explored to propose a short-term electricity-to-carbon method using machine learning methods based on historical data of electricity. This method utilizes convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for feature extraction, and light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) for carbon emission estimation based on extracted features. Moreover, K-fold cross-validation is used in model training, with parameter optimization using grid search to enhance the generalization capability and robustness of the model. To validate the proposed method, it is compared with other machine learning models under the same data segmentation condition for daily and hourly data sets. The results indicate that the proposed model outperforms other models in both performance evaluation and the consistency between estimated and target values.