Introducing WattCarbon’s Energy Transition Marketplace

Fight climate change. Eliminate fossil fuels. Decarbonize buildings.

Many of us have spent the summer watching, with no small amount of horror, the unfolding spectacle of El Nino-fueled heat waves, flash flooding, and orders of magnitude departures from normal readings across nearly every conceivable climate metric. Is the end nigh? Perhaps.

But more likely, what we see today is simply a harbinger of things to come. This year’s Pacific oscillation will fade and with it the most extreme of current conditions will abate, only to be replaced by ever more alien versions of “normal.” Like many of you, my family has played the game “where will it be safe to live?” Also like many of you, we simply have no good answer.

However, while the danger curve is steep, the range of all possible climate outcomes in the next few decades is still wide. If we can reduce global emissions by 40% by the end of this decade, GHG levels in the atmosphere will mostly stabilize and the technological innovations erupting around us will start to become accretive to a less dire future in which the mainsprings of human life are preserved, and indeed replenished. We remain optimistic.

Stop Greenwashing and Get to Work

So, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. For the past few decades, we’ve collectively been in somewhat of a state of denial, believing that climate action is about preserving nature, when in fact it’s about changing the way that humans interact with nature. We’re in the Anthropocene Era now. We control our own destiny.

Climate action takes many forms, but organizing the deployment of large amounts of capital against the main sources of carbon emissions, namely fossil fuels combusted for transportation, electricity, and heating, may be our best shot at hitting our baseline climate goals. Instead of relying on half-hearted utility programs and underfunded incentive programs to change hearts and minds, we need to develop durable systems that actually value the emission reductions associated with clean energy projects.

Our Better World

As a thought experiment, imagine a world in which the oil and gas industry had never woven the idea of “your carbon footprint” into our climate discourse. What if instead we thought about decarbonization as a shared mission, a way to achieve the 40% reduction in GHG emissions needed by the end of the decade? What if we could band together to drive the deployment of millions of heat pumps, make sure that solar power was accessible to all, and turn our buildings into extensions of the grid so that utilities would be forced to retire their fossil fuel power stations faster?

What if in doing all of this we could also introduce state-of-the-art measurement and verification of carbon emissions? What if every watt-hour of electricity and gram of carbon could be tracked, so that climate action claims were no longer dubious? What if instead of a natural gas furnace, your local HVAC installer carried a heat pump on her truck by default because she knew that the carbon savings would be worth more than the additional cost of the new unit?

Today, WattCarbon is proud to announce that these questions are no longer hypotheticals. The future that we imagined two years ago when we started this company is now here. For the first time, any individual, organization, corporation, or government can join forces to help fund the deployment of building decarbonization technologies at scale. We can all now join the journey towards eliminating the use of fossil fuels in our lives.

The Era of Carbon Offsets Climate Action is Here

Practically speaking, what this all means is that we are rolling out what we call our Energy Transition Marketplace (or “EAC Marketplace” for short). Our first tranche of energy decarbonization portfolios will generate 1,000 MWh of carbon free electricity on one of the dirtiest grids in the United States, 1,000 MWh of energy reductions in the evening hours when the grid is dirtiest in California, and 1,000 tons of CO2e emission reductions from building electrification projects between now and the end of the year.

By design, the exact projects aren’t known yet. Instead, the marketplace provides an advance market commitment that guarantees payments to decarbonization companies for the carbon savings they are able to generate through their projects. This commitment allows these companies to go compete directly against fossil fuel incumbents and deploy clean energy technologies. As a buyer in the marketplace, you will receive the EACs (Energy Attribute Certificates) that are generated by these projects once they are completed. You can use the EACs against your own net zero goals or simply as a way to certify the impacts of your climate actions.

We invite you to join our mission to accelerate decarbonization. This is the moment that we turn climate anxiety into climate action. This is the moment that we resist cynicism and pledge a better future to our children and grandchildren. This is our moment.