The Decarbonization Road Ahead

Every gram counts

And so it begins. The last time I had this feeling was in the days after 9/11. We all knew that the world had profoundly and irreversibly changed, but we didn’t quite know what it would look like, what the implications would be, or how it would change our daily lives.

Over the past decade, “climate” became a hot-button political issue. It nearly perfectly encapsulated the proxy war in the United States between an ascendant professional class and the rear-guard allies of the extractive class. With voters last week ushering in a near clean sweep of political candidates attached to the extractive class, the politics of climate will undoubtedly shift over the next few months.

The good news for the planet is that the forward momentum of decarbonization will be hard to stop. Technology has advanced to the point where cleaner energy equals cheaper energy and, irrespective of political leanings, most people don’t want to go back to the days of choking air pollution and unsafe drinking water.

On the other hand, we will likely see a flip from the top-down decarbonization of the past decade, to bottom-up decarbonization, driven by a more decentralized climate movement. Over the past few years, hundreds of billions of dollars have been funneled into clean energy projects by the federal government and large corporations. They’ve invested in massive solar and wind farms, huge battery deployments, new factories, and so on. With the federal spigot turned down (if not off entirely), and corporate leaders wary of running afoul of anti-ESG zealots, the heavy-lifting will fall to states and communities, and ultimately to individuals who believe in a better future.

Fortunately, decarbonization simply makes sense at this point. Lower costs, better health outcomes, more resilience, and community value are all reasons why investments into decarbonization are better than doubling down on fossil fuels.

Implications for WattCarbon

For obvious reasons, we at WattCarbon would have preferred a political outcome that continued to prioritize investments into non-carbon-based energy systems. Profound uncertainty will grip our industry for the foreseeable future (murky as that future may be). Undoubtedly the world will look very different in two years. I expect that many who were reluctant to embrace a sustainability agenda in the first place will quickly retreat.

We’re not ready to roll over! In fact, we’re ready to double down on the efficacy of decarbonization. Over the past three years, we have been investing in building a revenue-grade system of record for decarbonization investments. The centerpiece of this system is WEATS - the WattCarbon Energy Attribute Tracking System - that assigns every watt-hour and gram of carbon a unique, traceable serial number. But there’s a deeper layer of measurement and verification that is even more essential to the future of decarbonization that sits underneath WEATS. If decarbonization is to be justified on first principles, it has to be rigorously underwritten and transparently defensible. No hand-waving allowed!

I’m going to be sharing a lot more about this M&V work over the next few months. We’ve been working on case studies of how granular tracking of energy decarbonization investments reveals the value of revenue-grade data infrastructure. Fundamentally, investment into decarbonization requires this new type of system of record.

Energy Decarbonization Management

At the end of the day, our energy systems will be decarbonized. Which means that somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 trillion will be invested over the next few decades to install heat pumps, rooftop solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, stoves, and more. With funds limited, it’s going to be important that we get the biggest decarb bang for our buck.

If you have a decarbonization goal, you must have a system of record for tracking the impacts of your investments (annual accounting isn’t going to cut it). You need to strategically invest in your own emissions reductions, optimize your energy use for clean energy, and ultimately probably make investments outside of your own footprint for the emissions that you can’t eliminate in the meantime.

We’re excited to continue helping companies with decarbonization goals get smarter about their plans and deliver greater value to their stakeholders. If the election results have you fired up to make a difference, we’d love to chat.