Introducing WEATS Pro: the data platform to power your clean energy programs
Now, any company implementing distributed clean energy projects can leverage WEATS as its system of record for proving emission reductions.
Three years ago, when we launched WattCarbon, we knew that the era of decarbonization was upon us. New granular source data, the emergence of flexible, local clean energy resources, and powerful tools for measurement and verification could be combined to unleash a wave of investment into distributed decarbonization projects.
However, to unlock capital at scale, we first needed to create the data infrastructure required to support auditable decarbonization investments. Hourly carbon accounting, integrated support for demand side energy resources, and open source measurement and verification are table stakes for the decarbonization era.
Earlier this year, we deployed the basic infrastructure for distributed energy decarbonization, launching the WattCarbon Energy Attribute Tracking System (WEATS), the first registry for hourly energy attribute certificates (EACs) generated from distributed energy resources. WEATS now serves as WattCarbon’s source of truth for its OpenEAC Exchange.
In the six months since launching WEATS, we’ve found that, in addition to our own use cases, many other companies and organizations are also looking for granular tracking and accounting for their own clean energy programs, to prove decarbonization impacts to their own stakeholders.
Today, we’re excited to announce WEATS Pro. We’ve expanded WEATS into a decarbonization management tool that you can use to manage your own decarbonization program. Now, every energy efficiency project, demand flexibility device, EV charging station, battery, heat pump, electric stove, etc., can leverage WEATS as its system of record for proving emission reductions.
How does it work?
We’ve designed around simplicity and flexibility. You connect your energy data to WEATS Pro via our API. WattCarbon will receive your data, and our platform will create a serialized EAC for each watt-hour of electricity or gram of CO2 that you save. The EAC is the atomic unit of record for your carbon emission reduction claims. The corresponding value of the EAC comes from its “attributes.” For electricity, you might care about the time of day, the grid region, or its carbon intensity. For CO2, you might care whether or not the project happened in a low-income community. You might also care about additionality or incrementality. You might want to know if your battery was discharging electricity sourced from onsite solar or from the local grid. These pieces of information are all attributes that get attached to an EAC.
In some cases, you might want to use EACs to document energy consumption, not just energy savings. Think of this as a more accurate way to measure the carbon footprint of your energy use. Especially when energy is measured with metering infrastructure, EACs are a powerful way of converting flat energy files into multidimensional carbon data.
In addition to creating attributes, we’ve also made it possible to categorize EACs across Scope 1, 2, and 3 emission categories. In commercial office buildings, data centers, warehouses, and more, the challenge of assigning EACs across emissions categories has emerged as one of the central challenges of decarbonization. For example, in a commercial office building, multiple stakeholders will make a claim on the associated emissions of a building. The owner might be required to report Scope 1, while the tenants report Scope 2, but the tenants also report Scope 3 for the Scope 1 emissions claimed by the owner. Complicating things further, a third-party property manager might also claim aggregated Scope 3 emissions as part of their downstream supply chain.
WEATS handles the emission assignment to make sure that individual EACs are allocated to the right parties for the right Scope reporting. Site-level auditability is critical for compliance. This assignment process is also central to making claims for emission reductions, so that double counting of the same reduction doesn’t occur within the same Scope category. Ultimately, the same energy records (and savings measurement & verification) should be used to support claims across all stakeholders.
Using WEATS Pro
Those of you who were around for the early WattCarbon days know that we developed some pretty cool carbon management dashboards. In fact, you can still find these tools if you login to your account. But the more basic use case of using WEATS as a system of record is now the core direction of the WEATS Pro platform. A simpler interface designed around EACs is now the default view within WattCarbon.
The reason for this is that most enterprise users prefer to use an API endpoint, where they can take their EAC data and deploy it in their own native applications. We’ve designed the API to be fast and flexible, to support use cases ranging from carbon accounting to advanced analytics. The interface work that we prioritize will focus on auditing and validating data throughput, rather than tools that would support data analytics. We think of our software as providing you with a ledger of accounts, and we fully expect others in our ecosystem to build tools that will augment this data.
Data Integrations
The basic use case for WEATS Pro assumes that you have data in an existing database that you want to upload via our API. But we are also excited to continue supporting integrations with data providers like UtilityAPI, Derapi, Bayou Energy, Arcadia, and Texture as well as market integrators like Leap and Balto. These companies are essential partners in our ecosystem.
You’re invited
The WEATS Pro enterprise product is now live. Join the webinar on September 12th to learn how WEATS Pro can accelerate your decarbonization strategy.
Learn more
To learn more about WEATS Pro or request a demo, get in touch with Matt Lynch (matt@wattcarbon.com) or create your account today on WattCarbon. We’re excited to see the future of energy decarbonization being created around us and hope that you’ll join our movement.