M&V in the WEATS Registry now live

Plus how our strategy is evolving

Late Wednesday afternoon this past week, we flipped the feature flag that allows the WEATS Registry (https://www.wattcarbon.com/weats) to show the specific steps and intermediate data outputs that comprise the measurement and verification of energy and carbon savings within the WattCarbon platform. This feature represents a fairly substantial milestone for us, for the industry, and for how we’re thinking about decarbonization in the Trump 2.0 world. It’s worth digging in a little.

Let’s start with the feature itself. We’re trying to solve the problem of a lack of trust in claims that are made around sustainability. “I don’t believe your net-zero nonsense” underlies climate skepticism on both the left and the right and makes the middle tune out. Our antidote is a line-by-line explanation of how we provide a verifiable savings claim that shows all of the steps that were taken to get the answer. Now, this line-by-line approach is highly technical, so it’s unlikely to result in a Kumbaya moment for climate, also because people have better things to do than read detailed M&V reports. But the underlying principle gets at what needs to be a regime shift in how we think about decarbonization.

Whenever we don’t really care about the verification of claims, when “good enough” is good enough, we’re implementing an ideology. When we actually care about the verification of claims, we’re solving a real problem.

Looking at the world through this lens is illuminating because it breaks apart the concept of measurement and verification into two distinct components. The latter, verification, is a policy requirement. Some policies require very precise and accurate verification - like paying your taxes; some policies are quite loose - like flossing twice a day. As a result, measurement tends to follow from the verification requirements of policies. The IRS requires your employer to very specifically measure your wages and conducts audits of those it thinks might be cheating. As a result, tax M&V is extremely rigorous. Your dentist just gives you a stern lecture about gum health. And let’s be honest, there’s not much M&V when it comes to flossing regularly.

So if we want to bring trust back into claims around decarbonization, we need approaches that demand rigorous verification standards. And these verification standards need the types of measurement tools that can give all sides confidence that the claims being made are legitimate.

The Value of Public M&V

When we launched our EAC procurement pilot in 2023, one of the big questions we wanted to answer was whether or not we could measure energy and carbon savings both across different types of energy assets and over long periods of time. This would involve a more generalized approach to M&V than had traditionally existed. We created EACs (Energy Attribute Certificates) that would provide the granularity needed for verification, but while we tried to be transparent about how we were calculating savings, at the end of the day, you just kind of had to take our word for it.

Side note, for a while we thought we would just take anyone’s M&V and put the savings into WEATS. But after a few early experiences where the third-party calculation methodologies were basically indefensible, we decided to pull the plug on that experiment.

Anyway, making our M&V public became a long-term goal of ours, but it wasn’t at all obvious how to make this happen. Since we are calculating savings on a nightly basis, and the underlying data changes each time, we had to have some way to reproduce all of the data in a structured way to be able to show our work alongside each new batch of EACs. And we had to template the methodologies so that they would show up properly in the user interface with the proper links to supporting documentation.

In our 2023 pilot, we deployed a portfolio of solar assets, a portfolio of demand response assets, and a portfolio of heat pump assets. The first two were a fixed-term, one-time calculation, but the heat pumps are generating EACs on an ongoing basis for their full 15 year life. These projects were deployed by Elephant Energy, QuitCarbon, and BlocPower and are most of the entries that you see today when you look at the WEATS Registry.

For the heat pump methodology we adapted the approach of the State of Massachusetts for heat pumps, but substituted NREL’s End Use Loadshape database to create hourly load profiles scaled to weather normalized annual consumption from energy bills. These methodological details are specified in the M&V Plans (located at https://docs.wattcarbon.com) and now show up line by line in the Registry. Finally, we’ve achieved at least a v1.0 of this concept!

Strategic Implications

A few months ago, we announced that we were no longer trying to run a marketplace on top of serving as the M&V and system of record for decarbonization projects. The marketplace was a conflict of interest for us and the reality of the situation is that the market is so tiny that all of the deals getting done were happening bilaterally anyway. This was hard to swallow (who doesn’t want to have a marketplace business), but like so many of these decisions, by closing one door we have opened up others.

It turns out that lots of organizations have been trying to raise the bar on verification, but have been stymied by a lack of resources for rigorous measurement and no way to keep track of everything. The curse of ad-hoc analysis and PDF reports strikes again.

More and more, we’ve been hearing from organizations that are interested in setting up their own decarbonization programs, monetizing the value of their EACs, or just trying to understand their impacts better with more consistent, transparent reporting. And with the now certain demise of both international as well as federal support for the energy transition, the need has never been greater for infrastructure that allows for distributed decarbonization programs to flourish.

What we are able to show publicly in the WEATS Registry is a small sliver of the powerful analytics that are unlocked for the project developer within the WattCarbon platform. Our early partners are now reaping the benefits of these insights, but we want to bring the power of automated M&V to everyone who is deploying clean energy.

So the next big feature that we’ll release is the ability for any organization to connect to a data services provider and automatically start generating the same kinds of insights that are available to our early partners. No longer will they be bound by the requirement of transacting EACs. But rather, the EAC becomes their way of showing the credibility of their claims, holding themselves accountable, and generating confidence within their own stakeholder ecosystems.

Hope is hard to find in the mayhem that grips our daily lives, and sometimes it feels easier to just ignore the fact that the earth is now substantially warmer than at any other time of human history. There’s a lack of global consensus on how to fix things, an outright hostility in the federal government, and a general skepticism amongst the general public that climate should even be an issue. It’s unlikely that we reach any sort of global consensus any time soon, and federal elections are still nearly two years away. So rather than sit around and sulk, the one thing we can do is address the pervasive skepticism that climate investments are meaningful. The way that we do that is by raising our own standards. We won’t win by implementing an ideology, we’ll win by solving real problems. When that happens, and we have the receipts to show for it, the case will become much easier to make everywhere.