Introducing WEATS, the Registry to Support the Clean Energy Transition

Today we’re launching the WattCarbon Energy Attribute Tracking System (WEATS), the first registry designed from the ground-up for distributed energy resources

The need to reinvent our clean energy buying markets has become obvious. Sophisticated companies are shifting towards granular, hourly clean energy matching. Similarly, clean energy policies like the recent green hydrogen tax credit guidance are now requiring hourly and locational matching. 

Still, the market infrastructure required to meet these higher standards doesn’t exist. Most companies are still purchasing unmatched RECs, and wondering how they will make the leap to impact-based energy procurement.

Today we are thrilled to launch the WattCarbon Energy Attribute Tracking System (WEATS), the first clean energy registry designed specifically for distributed energy resources (DERs), with the precision to track and transact watt-hour EACs from any clean energy resource, for any hour of the day.

With WEATS, any DER owner or project developer can now monetize the environmental benefits of their clean energy resources, and any company can scale energy decarbonization in their own community by procuring the EACs from these projects.

Why do we need a clean energy market for DERs?

DERs, including rooftop solar, batteries, heat pumps, and demand response, are vital for transitioning to a clean economy. However, DERs have been mostly overlooked by voluntary REC markets, which get most of their supply from places where clean energy is already the cheapest fuel option. As a result, we see a glut of low-priced RECs from Texas and Oklahoma wind farms on the market and virtually nothing from the parts of the country and the times of day in which renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels.

To decarbonize, we must focus on buying clean energy in times and places when it would otherwise be more cost-effective to use dirty energy instead.

Renewable generation, while important, is also only one piece of the decarbonization puzzle. DERs fill in the gaps. Batteries charge when the grid has extra clean energy, and discharge when supply is fossil based. Heat pumps use electricity rather than natural gas to heat our water and keep us warm. Energy efficiency and demand response, if properly signaled, shift loads away from the most polluting times of day.

WEATS will enable DERs to be fully valued for their environmental benefits. Any DER system that can connect through a WEATS data validator will be able to generate EACs that represent the clean attributes of their energy. Owners of EACs will be able to retire them on behalf of their own net-zero goals or sell them on the WattCarbon marketplace to any other individual, organization, or company that is looking for a more impactful way to mitigate its own energy-related emissions.

How the WEATS Registry Works Alongside the WattCarbon Marketplace

WEATS is designed to serve as a system of record for sites and assets that produce EACs, as well as the generation, exchange, and retirement of EACs themselves. To ensure data integrity, WEATS relies on a network of Data Validators that authenticate energy savings, track renewable generation, calibrate carbon emissions, and certify other relevant attributes.

The most important of these Data Validators are the companies that are helping to deploy DERs on the ground. They serve as the bridge between the end customer and WEATS, validating both that the systems exist as claimed as well as that the generation or savings data associated with these systems is accurate. Where possible, WattCarbon also independently verifies using publicly available permit data.

Any third party can serve as a Data Validator. WattCarbon is grateful to the dozen or so companies that have helped us test this functionality over the past few months. These companies already show up as Data Validators in the WEATS Registry onboarding page. Starting today, their customers are able to add DER systems to WEATS using information already collected, so that EACs can be generated alongside the clean energy.

Separately, owners of EACs can offer their EACs for sale via the WattCarbon Marketplace at a price of their own choosing. This functionality is new. If you were a participant in the beta version of the WattCarbon Marketplace last year, you will remember that EACs were offered as part of a portfolio of projects at a fixed price. Now that we have all of the infrastructure in place to support an open market, we are no longer supporting this fixed price option. Instead, buyers and sellers will transact directly through Listings that appear on the Marketplace page.

For clean energy buyers, anyone can purchase hourly EACs directly from the WattCarbon Marketplace with a credit card. Companies can also contract vPPAs to customize their procurement around the exact attributes that they desire. For now, these vPPA transactions are handled offline, but we hope to provide listings for them in the coming months.

We’ve added to our FAQ documentation, which will hopefully answer most of the rest of the questions that are popping into your head at this moment, but if we haven’t, please feel free to reach out to us.

Built on Open Source Protocols and Open Source Principles

Much of the work that is being released today would not have been possible without the growing ecosystem of open source practitioners. We relied heavily on EnergyTag’s framework for Granular Certificates, and while we probably can’t be certified as EnergyTag compliant because we include non-generation resources in our Registry, we are grateful for the work of that team in creating a framework that we could plug into. Other open data that is incorporated into the Registry includes the Energy Information Agency’s Hourly Carbon Emissions data for each balancing authority in the United States. This is an invaluable source of information to help contextualize the impact of clean energy procurement at different times of day and on different grids.

As we look ahead, we would like to formalize and standardize the methods and data standards that we are adopting for WEATS within an open source protocol. The last thing that this industry needs is another walled garden. Rather, an open ecosystem that is built around principles of interoperability will yield much better outcomes in the long run. If helping to create these protocols is interesting to you, please let us know so that we can include you in our planning efforts.

If you’re still with us - thanks for reading! You can check everything out at https://app.wattcarbon.com/marketplace. We’re excited about this moment and the decarbonization impact to come.