An Invitation to Review our Draft Metered Energy Methods
Renewables, Batteries, and Carbon Accounting
WattCarbon is in the process of publicly documenting our methods for calculating carbon savings. Thus far we have focused on two decarbonization use cases requiring counterfactual calculations - electrification and demand response. A seemingly more straightforward use case involves directly metered production that does not require a counterfactual for measurement, such as renewable energy production or battery dispatch. However, even this mostly intuitive use case can become complicated when considering the range of technologies deployed.
We are pleased to share the third installment of our carbon accounting methods:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l6gfVwLnjSyo7mb4bS61uywI9U9k7bATofZtkeuar0E/edit
The above linked document describes how we account for carbon emissions associated with hourly renewable energy production, as well as how we account for carbon emissions associated with battery load shifting. It provides a high level description of our EAC Registry, but we will provide a more detailed spec on this part of our work soon as well.
It is worth noting ahead of time that we are not thinking of batteries in terms of load balancing assets, but rather as load shifting assets. The difference is that load balancing implies short term charging and discharging cycles (second or sub-second response times) where the battery may be making up for a temporary spike in demand or shortfall in energy production, whereas load shifting attempts to charge the battery during high-renewable times of day and discharge when renewable energy is less prevalent. Load balancing would likely use a marginal emissions value, whereas load shifting needs to take into account the entire stack of resources that are deployed at a given hour of the day to provide electricity, or the consumed emissions of the grid.
As with our other documents, we encourage your feedback and questions. We are releasing these documents to the public so that we can solicit comments from as wide of an audience as possible. Thanks to all of those who have already commented on earlier drafts.