Shovels and WattCarbon join forces to supercharge residential electrification
Shovels is investing a percentage of its quarterly revenue into WattCarbon’s OpenEAC Exchange.
To meet global climate goals the US needs to deploy over 100 million heat pumps. Enough to rip out every building’s gas-burning furnace, and replace it with an electric unit.
Shovels and WattCarbon are joining forces to help make that happen.
Shovels, a company making building data accessible to accelerate decarbonization, is investing a percentage of its quarterly revenue into WattCarbon’s OpenEAC Exchange. The funding will be distributed to electrification companies including Elephant Energy, QuitCarbon, and Upfront, who will use it to lower prohibitive entry costs for customers and expand access to projects that may not have otherwise been viable.
These recurring investments are especially critical in providing suppliers with certainty about EAC demand, which enables them to bake in customer incentives and close future sales that would not have been otherwise possible.
DR Richardson, Co-Founder of Elephant Energy, says, “We need new ways to make physical decarbonization go faster, we can’t just SaaS our way out of the climate crisis. Aligning new sorts of smarter incentives and boots-on-the-ground grit will help us get the wheels up on this thing and decarbonize faster. That’s exactly what WattCarbon is nailing with its EAC model––helping us rip out more fossil fuel heaters and improving access for those historically kept out of the clean energy transition.”
Shovels is a venture capital-backed startup that helps organizations like Rewiring America and enterprises like Oracle understand where building electrification activity is happening. Partnering with WattCarbon to put a percentage of their revenue toward EACs was a natural fit.
“We launched Shovels because we saw an opportunity to leverage building permit data to help consumers and businesses transition to an all-electric future. We’re delighted to further that mission by putting some of our revenue toward residential heat pump adoption,” says Shovels CEO Ryan Buckley.
Heat pumps are powerful climate solutions, with the potential to cut 42% of energy-related emissions once they’re fully deployed. But right now, they’re still only in 16% of homes nationwide, and according to Rewiring America, sales need to triple by 2032 to keep us on track.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is still installing 20,000 new gas furnaces every day, locking in carbon emissions for another 15 years or more. The reason? Heat pumps are still too pricey for most homeowners to afford. We need to use market mechanisms to value the carbon benefits of this technology and bring those costs down.
That’s where the Shovels and WattCarbon partnership comes in, advancing new models for how we invest in decarbonization. Historically, EACs haven’t been available for heat pumps and electrification projects because the technology’s benefits come from reducing carbon emissions, rather than generating clean energy (as is valued in legacy renewable energy markets). WattCarbon’s independent EAC registry, WEATS, is the first to track and generate EACs that include carbon impacts, opening up a fresh approach to investing in clean energy and carbon-saving projects.
We’ve seen how corporate investment has driven down costs and scaled up deployment in wind and solar –– 44% of all wind and solar production has been contracted within the past two years. Applying this model to electrification and other distributed energy resources could be the key to making clean energy affordable for everyone, and 10x’ing our pace toward net-zero.
"If our polluted planet is an overflowing bathtub of emissions, swapping gas furnaces for heat pumps turns off the tap, while most carbon credit programs are like trying to sop up the mess with paper towels. Partnering with visionaries like Shovels allows us to funnel clean energy investments straight into new projects that make an immediate emissions reduction impact,” says WattCarbon Founder and CEO, McGee Young.
To learn more about how you can invest in EACs from distributed clean energy, check out WattCarbon's OpenEAC Exchange or reach out to info@wattcarbon.com