OpenEAC Alliance update and M&V in the Registry

It's been a long road, but we're just about ready to reveal the work that's gone into building revenue-grade M&V

Mark your calendars for February 20th, when the next meeting (register here) of the OpenEAC Alliance will be held. For those of you who haven’t been following, we created the OpenEAC Alliance about a year ago to work on methodology development for carbon-centric measurement and verification of energy savings. The idea was to take existing industry standards, like CalTrack, and update them for the specific task of calculating carbon emission reductions.

At the February 20th meeting, Steve and I will share the work we’ve been putting in to organizing a comprehensive methodological framework that allows us to calculate the carbon savings from any type of device, in any type of building, using any type of data. We’ll show how the Methodologies, which are approved by the OpenEAC Alliance members, are connected to specific M&V plans, which represent a sort of contract between parties to execute a particular implementation of a methodology. The M&V plans are then implemented within WattCarbon’s software, which then ultimately outputs savings calculations that show up in our WEATS Registry.

If you go look at our Registry today, you’ll see that the vast majority of what shows up are EAC allocations from the pilot we ran last year, where our brave early-adopters bought into portfolios of heat pump projects from Elephant Energy, QuitCarbon, and BlocPower. They pre-purchased a stream of EACs that helped get these projects going. Now that the projects are fully operational, the EACs are being generated on a nightly basis and allocated to the buyers on a pro-rata basis. If you look carefully, you’ll see that there are other things happening on the Registry too, like new assets being registered, etc., but the main action is the distribution of the EACs.

Coming Soon…M&V in the Registry

What you won’t see today, but you will shortly, is the M&V. How did we arrive at the savings calculation that determines how many EACs are generated? What exact methodology did we follow? Where is the M&V plan filed? What were the intermediate outputs? These are the important questions that ultimately make the savings calculation meaningful.

Our industry of M&V professionals has never been good at showing its work. Part of this is because of technical limitations. The work is done in Excel and shared in a PDF report. Neither of these formats lend themselves to transparency. But there’s a darker side to the opacity as well. It’s fairly easy to game M&V to generate the outcome that you want. There’s a conflict of interest that makes it easy for everyone to look the other way when rosy numbers are reported.

In fairness, this is part of a broader problem of lack of transparency. Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented investment into decarbonization projects. It’s likely that more than $3 trillion has been invested in the United States alone in the past five years. Most of these investments were made because they were the right thing to do. Most of us collectively understand that GHG emissions are leading to unsustainable increases in global temperatures and that the only way to forestall catastrophic changes to our climate is to eliminate these emissions.

But while we’ve made these investments in good faith, we haven’t built the data systems or tools that would be able to tell us whether or not they are returning the value promised. We’ve been focused on ESG, not ROI. As political winds have shifted, so has scrutiny of clean energy investments. Most of these still make sense because of the cost-savings alone, but in order to make the case, you have to be able to trust your numbers.

This is why we’re putting M&V into the Registry. We know that right now the scariest words to a head of sustainability are “show me how you got your numbers.” This is a solvable problem. And by increasing the transparency and the trust between parties that carbon emission reductions are real and validated by actual data from the projects themselves, we believe that we can reinvigorate investment into decarbonization, irrespective of the hostility at the national level of government and the impotence of global climate institutions.