Amidst climate change concerns, we can't afford to forget about mercury emissions: just ask the Great Lakes

In the unfolding story of the climate crisis and the battle to avert its worst effects, carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions play a starring role in much media coverage, and rightfully so. But there’s another, lesser-discussed villain that deserves our attention, too: mercury. These emissions are also released in the process of burning coal for electricity and pose a serious human health hazard. And while the US overall is making impressive strides in installing new wind and solar while retiring coal-fired generation, there’s still a lot of legacy coal in the system. This holds true for the Great Lakes region of the country, where coal consumption is still fairly high, even as states make exciting clean energy commitments. This region has felt the effects of mercury contamination more than any other in the country. That’s why the Great Lakes Protection Fund (GLPF) is supporting a team of energy and tech experts to unleash a business-minded solution leveraging the power of technology. WattTime, alongside demand response program administrators, Midwest utilities and a smart thermostat maker, will be deploying Automated Emissions Reduction (AER) to reduce mercury emissions. Don’t worry, we’ll explain. Coal plants and mercury emissions: an insidious duo As far as environmental health hazards go, mercury is right up there with the best (or worst) of them. And coal-fired power plants, which deposit about 50 million tons of coal ash per year into surrounding bodies of water, are some of the largest emitters of all. As mercury makes its way into our water, it’s consumed by fish and then bioaccumulates and becomes more potent to those higher up the food chain (like you and me). In large enough doses, it can cause serious harm to the nervous and reproductive systems, and in some cases even death. This is all to say, you’d probably rather have a side of tartar sauce with your fish and chips than even a droplet of mercury. A simple—and effective—regulatory solution slipping through our fingers Recognizing the urgent need to protect the public from this destructive coal byproduct, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) implemented a regulation in 2011 to reduce mercury emissions: The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). Under the new rule, coal plants were required to install highly effective mercury emissions control technology. Between 2011 and 2017, we saw an 81 percent decrease in emissions from power plants. WattTime’s detailed mercury emissions data supports these numbers — the almost instantaneous drop off was unlike anything caused by previous EPA guidelines. Problem solved, right? Until now. Under the current administration, the EPA has proposed a measure to seriously weaken or even potentially repeal the MATS rule. And because mercury control technology is expensive to keep running, it’s highly likely that many plants would discontinue using it without a requirement. In a worst-case-scenario horror story—which is not impossible here—mercury emissions could increase up to tenfold overnight. WattTime teams up with Great Lakes Protection Fund to tackle mercury emissions As is becoming more common with the pace of innovation today, there’s an intelligent tech solution waiting in the wings should policy fail us, and that’s where AER enters the story. With the support of a grant from the GLPF, WattTime is leading a team to pilot its emissions reduction technology in the Great Lakes region to tackle the problem. Here’s how it will work: With WattTime’s real-time data on which power plants are “on the margin” and responding to new electricity demand at any given moment, we’re able to pinpoint when either coal plants or renewable sources are kicking into gear. Our software, when installed in any internet-connected smart device like an electric vehicle charger or smart thermostat, can automatically shift that device’s energy use to cleaner times of day.  This shift to clean energy leads to a decrease in carbon and other harmful emissions, including mercury. The number of devices in the Great Lakes region that could potentially leverage AER software is massive, and if just under half of them used the technology, we could do away with 269 pounds per year of mercury emissions. (To put that in perspective, just 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury thrown into a 25-acre lake can make the fish dangerous to consume.) The last piece of the puzzle: demand response programs While AER technology is simple, inexpensive and highly effective, it still requires a pathway to widespread adoption. So, WattTime is working with demand response (DR) programs in the Great Lakes region to jumpstart its use. Over 100 DR programs in the region financially incentivize people and businesses to shift their electricity use away from peak electricity demand times. For example, a power company may have the ability to cycle a customer’s HVAC system on and off during peak load times in exchange for lowering that customer’s electric bill. But many programs have struggled with their appeal to customers. Adding AER to the offering has a twofold benefit for DR programs: a) The new perk can boost enrollment and, b) The technology provides value all day, every day of the year. While a 2016 multi-million dollar campaign by DR programs to improve participation only persuaded five percent of customers to accept it, WattTime’s analysis has shown that the chance to have a positive environmental impact is actually enormously attractive to consumers. WattTime’s AER programs, which offer no financial incentive, delivered 40 percent uptake in our first pilot and even reached 82 percent uptake by our third project implementation. (By comparison, the 2017 average participation rate in energy management programs like DR was only 17 percent.) Besides its capability to improve enrollment numbers, pairing AER with DR makes customer participation valuable 365 days a year, not just during occasional peak demand events. This is because the “marginal” power plant in a given region can change as often as every few minutes. To achieve maximum emissions reductions, AER functions continuously in the background making small fluctuations in energy usage throughout each day, every day. Even though DR and AER function independently, smart devices are perfectly capable of taking part in DR and AER simultaneously to deliver both environmental and cost benefits to customers year round. WattTime plans to work with utilities and DR aggregators in the Great Lakes region as part of a team to deploy large numbers of smart devices programmed with our AER software. By using these devices, consumers can essentially choose to give more of their electricity business to cleaner power plants as opposed to coal-fired plants that are worsening the mercury crisis. Providing an additional market signal to keep mercury pollution out of the air (and land and water) In the United States, power plants are called upon (and paid) to supply electricity via a dispatch stack system that ranks and orders plants by cost. And if mercury-emitting plants become less competitive with low- or zero-emitting plants — causing the cost of the power they supply to increase — they may get bumped out of that dispatch stack. This would have two major benefits: a) It avoids the direct emissions from their increased use. But more importantly, b) It provides a strong economic incentive for those power plants to keep running their MATS-compliance technology to avoid being deprioritized. Thanks to WattTime’s real-time data on marginal power plants, AER is capable of easily and automatically signaling when cleaner power is on the grid. When devices with flexible demand shift their energy use based on the AER signal, it dictates which power plants are called upon—and paid—to provide additional electricity. While direct mercury emissions reduction numbers are promising (our analysis shows an average of 16 percent reduction across all smart devices with flexible demand), it’s the indirect effect of using AER software that could create a substantial market transformation; consumers will shift significant amounts of energy demand from high-emitting plants to low-emitting plants. With one simple and effective solution, WattTime and the GLPF have their eyes set on the ultimate prize: reducing mercury emissions while also inspiring the cleanup of the entire generator fleet of the region. Stay tuned for more updates in 2019 as we work toward a happier ending for the mercury emissions story.

Mercury pollution regulations are under threat—how it could play out

As the end of 2018 draws nearer, headlines are once again starting to crop up about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—under the current White House administration—considering significant rollbacks of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) regulations, possibly even setting the stage for a full repeal.

This could be an unmitigated tragedy. In its short life—announced in 2011, implemented in 2012, and compliance required by 2015/2016—MATS has emerged as one of the single most-effective regulations in American history for protecting human health and the environment, especially from the ravages of mercury exposure.

Over the past half century, myriad regulations have been heralded for their role drastically reducing the harmful effects from known toxic pollutants: removing lead from gasoline and paint, removing arsenic from drinking water. MATS is of a similar echelon when it comes to drastically reducing mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants.

The resounding success of MATS: 86% mercury emissions reductions

An analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found a 65% nationwide reduction in annual power plant mercury emissions during the three-year period 2014–2017. Since 2011, CAP finds an 82% drop.

WattTime also crunched the numbers for eight states throughout the Great Lakes region across a similar time period (2014–2018) and found even more striking results: an 86% reduction in mercury emissions. Perhaps just as importantly, these significant emissions reductions were not via a gradual decline over those years. Mercury emissions essentially fell off a cliff. Pre-MATS and post-MATS mercury emissions were night and day. In other words, the regulations were highly effective.

A victory for human health and the environment is at risk

Mercury’s profoundly negative health effects are well-known: it ranks on the World Health Organization’s top 10 list of chemicals that pose a major public health concern. It’s the economic tally of those health effects—and their subsequent impact on the U.S. economy—partly at the heart of the MATS controversy.

Environmental regulations like MATS are generally evaluated on the cost for industry to comply with the regulation vs. the dollar-value benefit (e.g., healthcare costs, economic productivity) the regulation delivers. Mercury emissions-reducing technology is not cheap. It costs the electric utility industry an estimated $9.6 billion per year to comply, prompting the New York Times to label it “the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth by the federal government.” Some proponents of MATS argue that the cost of compliance is actually far less than the $9.6 billion estimate. But regardless, MATS compliance is relatively expensive.

On the other side of the coin is the economic value of the human health and environmental benefits MATS delivers. Original federal estimates put the direct mercury-reduction benefits at less than $10 million annually. Such meager numbers have generally been widely debunked. Harvard University’s School of Public Health notes that “mercury-related benefits from MATS are orders of magnitude larger than previously estimated,” on the scale of several billion dollars per year. Meanwhile, both the original federal estimates and subsequent third-party review estimate indirect co-benefits at a whopping $24–$80 billion annually, since mercury-related MATS-compliance technologies also reduce other harmful pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.

If MATS is significantly weakened or repealed, mercury emissions are at risk of jumping up

Whether the true cost to run MATS compliance technology is $9.6 billion or something else, the fact is there remains a cost associated with the tech. Part of that expense is sunk upfront capital cost to install the technologies in the first place and part is ongoing operational costs to keep MATS-compliance technologies running.

Many utilities and other stakeholders have argued that the electricity sector broadly has already invested in these technologies, so there’s no sense going back to a pre-MATS world. To a degree, that’s true. But undoubtedly, coal-fired generators will have economic incentives to turn off their mercury emissions-reducing tech in a bid to reduce costs and stay more price-competitive.

If they do, the grid’s mercury emissions could rocket back up closer to their pre-MATS levels. For our part, WattTime will be watching. With our unique algorithms and near-real-time insights into grid emissions, we’ll be one of the first to know.

Possible pathways in a MATS (or post-MATS) future

There’s of course a big fork in the road looming just ahead, obscured by the fog of EPA uncertainty: either MATS continues in existence largely resembling its current form or MATS shrinks to a shadow of its former self, possibly disappearing entirely. If the latter—and legal challenges to its dissolution not withstanding—all is not necessarily lost.

WattTime’s Automated Emissions Reduction (AER) technology could potentially step in to do what an eviscerated MATS couldn’t. AER focuses in particular on marginal generators, those power plants “on the margin” of the dispatch curve that turn on or off in response to rising and falling electricity demand.

For customers passively using electricity, that all happens invisibly in the background of grid operations. But with smart devices controlling flexible electricity loads—thermostats, batteries, electric vehicles, electric water heaters, etc.—customers can start shifting the timing of their electricity demand to proactively turn marginal generators on or off, like a light switch for the electricity grid. And if we knew which power plants were on the margin when, we could start applying customer-driven criteria to the smart devices to effect specific outcomes, such as using more renewable energy and avoiding more fossil-fueled energy, or reducing marginal carbon and other GHG emissions, or—in the case of MATS—avoiding those generators with higher mercury emissions.

AER is the solution that delivers on this promise. In a (hopefully hypothetical) post-MATS world, AER could prove a powerful tool for avoiding mercury emissions in two critical ways:

First, direct implementation of AER on smart devices could shift electricity demand to avoid marginal generators with high mercury emissions rates and use more electricity during times when marginal generators are mercury emissions-free. According to WattTime analysis, attacking marginal mercury emissions in this way could reduce annual energy-related mercury emissions in the Great Lakes region by a meaningful 16% if AER were adopted at scale.

Second, broad customer adoption of AER could provide a strong market signal for fossil-fueled power plants to keep their MATS-compliance technologies running. With the United States’ merit order dispatch stack for electricity generators, a given power plant only provides power—and, importantly, only gets paid—if it’s part of the dispatch stack. Thus there’s strong incentive to stay in the stack.

Meanwhile, AER gives customers the power to help decide who’s in or out of the stack based on criteria such as emissions. If large numbers of customers leverage AER software to avoid power plants that have higher mercury emissions, those power plants will have a good reason to keep their MATS-compliance technologies running. That outcome would help reduce mercury emissions whenever those power plants are running, and not just when they’re on the margin.

Of course, here at WattTime we’re rooting for MATS to survive. Either way, however, AER remains a compelling tool that gives customers the power to choose clean energy—and, if need be, avoid what could be a lamentable increase in mercury emissions.

The sky is falling: why the time for automated emissions reduction is NOW

In the fabled European folk tale of Chicken Little, the story's eponymous central character believes the world is coming to an end, famously declaring "The sky is falling!" In the centuries since, the idiom’s pop-culture usage has expanded to include the notion that disaster is imminent, whether such fears are founded or not.

To read the news across the past two months, it’s tempting to swap Chicken Little’s “The sky is falling!” for something equally dire along the lines of “The Earth is warming, a lot, and fast! Catastrophic consequences are nearly at our front door!”

In early October, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a widely covered report sounding the loudest alarm to date: the planet’s climate could surpass the 1.5-degree C mark by as soon as 2030 if emissions continue at their current rate, with calamitous outcomes the result.

Then on Black Friday in late November, the United States federal government released its own sweeping climate assessment. Its conclusions were no less dire. It forecasts that global warming will cause hundreds of billions of dollars in losses for the U.S. economy, while inflicting great damage to human health, the environment, and infrastructure.

And on that report’s heels—as the world’s leaders prepared to meet in Poland earlier this month at COP 24—the UN’s Environment Programme released yet another cataclysmic report. In 2017, annual global greenhouse gas emissions reached their highest level ever, while the gap between countries’ emissions-reduction targets and actual emissions is wider than ever.

Feeling depressed yet?

Finding the resolve—and optimism—to act

In the face of this recent onslaught of seemingly doomsday warnings, it’s tempting to be Chicken Little. The sky is falling!

The urgency and concern of such a declaration are certainly well-placed. But apathy and inaction are not, even if the magnitude and severity of the situation feel paralyzing. We must act. We must maintain resolve—and our optimism—in the midst of this planetary crisis.

Our menu of available options has included a fairly familiar set of choices:

The ultimate end state would be an electrified, energy-efficient, zero-carbon global energy system. And an atmosphere whose greenhouse gas concentrations would levelize, or even start to recede.

As the recent reports have so starkly outlined, there’s a yawning chasm between the reality of today, the trajectories we’re on, and where the world needs to get within the next decade or two at most. How do we cross this chasm? And are other, additional options at our disposal?

Automated Emissions Reduction: the right solution at the right time

The world’s myriad energy systems—including its electricity grids—are amidst a great transition period. We are living during a period of overlap between the legacy fossil-fueled infrastructure of last century and the growing base of installed renewable capacity that will power the future.

For as long as these two worlds coexist, there is an enormous and largely untapped opportunity to cost-effectively seize immediate and potentially large emissions reductions. Electricity grids that boast a diverse mix of both fossil-fueled and renewably generated electricity turn out to have highly variable marginal emissions rates. From one moment to the next, the marginal generator being called upon to meet the last kilowatt of electricity demand might be a coal plant, or natural gas plant, or utility-scale solar array, or wind farm (among other options).

If there were a way to know which power plants were marginal where and when—and a way to modulate electricity demand to sync with times of cleaner energy and avoid times of dirtier energy—we could instantly slash electricity-related emissions and add another major tool to our arsenal in the war against climate change.

The accelerating proliferation of smart, Internet-connected devices controlling flexible electricity demand—thermostats, batteries, refrigerators, electric vehicles, etc.—is the first part of the solution. They offer the ability to shift around large amounts of electricity demand.

The second half of the solution is a signal that tells such devices what’s happening on the grid in real time. Without such a signal, smart flexible demand is like driving blind. Sure, you can accelerate and brake, turn left and right, but you have no good way to know when and where to do so.

WattTime’s Automated Emissions Reduction (AER) technology is that signal. It gives anyone—utilities, IoT device and energy storage companies, end users—the power to choose clean energy, easily and automatically. Based on cutting-edge algorithms and machine learning, AER is the missing link that gives smart devices the signal they need in order to reduce the emissions associated with their energy use.

AER alone of course won’t solve climate change. But the opportunity is ours to seize. AER is a broadly deployable capability we are providing with urgency today as a way to help close the gap between today’s emissions rates and what the planet and humanity needs to achieve. And for as long—or, hopefully, short—we’re deep in this state of transition from the fossil-fueled energy system of old and the renewably-powered future we need, AER is a uniquely suited solution to get more emissions out of the system all the sooner.

How Michigan’s 50% clean energy target could open new emissions reduction opportunities

Last month environmental advocates led by activist Tom Steyer and a coalition known as Clean Energy, Healthy Michigan claimed a major victory in advancing the state toward a clean energy—and a clean air—future.

Faced with a looming November 2018 ballot initiative that would have required 30% of Michigan’s electricity sales to come from renewable energy sources by 2030, the state’s two largest utilities, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, jointly announced instead to target 50% clean energy by 2030. At least 25% of their electricity sales will come from renewable energy. The balance of the target they’ll meet largely through energy efficiency.

This latest major development comes fast on the heels of two other notable bright spots earlier this year. In February, Consumers Energy announced that it would phase out its coal-fired generation over the next two decades, while also targeting generating at least 40% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2040. Then in April, DTE Energy submitted its 2018 Renewable Energy Plan to the Michigan Public Service Commission. The plan calls for doubling the utility’s renewable energy capacity by 2022 from 1 to 2 GW and driving $1.7 billion in clean energy investment, largely in wind energy with a small amount of solar.

All told, it comes as a big breath of fresh air to a state that wrestled with the problem for years.

Michigan’s fight for cleaner air

At the beginning of this decade, Michigan and its residents faced an air quality crisis underscored by two damning reports released just months apart. In May 2011, the journal Health Affairs published research showing how chronic air pollution around schools in Michigan was linked to poorer student health and academic performance, disproportionately affecting low-income and racial or ethnic minority communities. One of the chief sources of air quality problems? Power plant emissions.

Two months later, in July 2011 the Natural Resources Defense Council released its Toxic Twenty report, shining the spotlight of attention on those states with the highest levels of toxic air pollution from power plants. Michigan’s overall total industrial toxic air pollution was among the worst in the country. It ranked seventh worst specifically for toxic air pollution from the electricity sector, which accounted for 73% of the state’s air pollution.

By 2016, Michigan’s air pollution situation had started to improve according to the State’s annual air quality report, but still had a long way to go. In March of that year, Medical Daily–part of the Newsweek Media Group and boasting more than 8 million unique visitors per month and 2.2 million Facebook followers—declared Michigan’s air quality problem much bigger than the infamous water problem in Flint. More needed to be done to address the issue.

Clearer skies ahead for Michigan

At a time when other states from Hawaii to Oregon to New York have set bold renewable energy and clean energy targets, Michigan’s is particularly exciting because of how much positive impact it could have.

Last year fossil fuels generated just shy of 60% of Michigan’s electricity; coal alone accounted for 37%, according to numbers from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Renewables including hydro, meanwhile, generated just 8%.

According to a basic WattTime analysis, every megawatt of new wind energy built in Michigan today will displace about two-thirds coal-fired generation and one-third natural gas-fired generation. Thus based on today’s grid mix in Michigan, new renewable energy projects could avoid around a whopping 1,700 lbs CO2 emissions per MWh of generation. To put such numbers into perspective, that 1,700-lb swing in Michigan’s marginal grid emissions from dirty to clean makes the emissionality benefits of new renewables—how much fossil-fueled emissions are avoided for each MW of new renewables built—among the best in the country.

In fact, on an avoided-emissions-per-new-renewable-megawatt basis, renewable energy investments in Michigan are about twice as effective as similar investments in places such as parts of California, Florida, and Massachusetts and roughly 1.5x as effective as neighboring Great Lakes states such as New York.

And the benefits don’t stop there. As Michigan’s grid gets closer to its 50% clean energy target, the grid’s “personality” will change, too. It’ll go from being a “monotone” personality defined by a more or less steady stream of traditional, dirty, coal-fired baseload generation to a “dynamic” personality characterized by much larger minute-to-minute and hour-to-hour swings in marginal grid emissions depending on whether natural gas or variable renewables are supplying the electrons. This unlocks a whole other realm of possibility.

With a grid that has a constantly fluctuating rate of marginal emissions—from dirty to clean to dirty and so on—smart devices such as thermostats, electric water heaters, electric vehicles, battery energy storage, etc. can use real-time and predictive signals from a source such as WattTime in order to automatically and effortlessly use cleaner energy and avoid dirtier energy. This effectively multiplies the emissions benefits of Michigan’s new renewable energy and its clean energy target.

Depending on the specific device and how flexible you assume its electricity demand can be, this capability generates a “bonus” emissions reduction of 5–15% or more above and beyond the aforementioned savings achieved by increasing renewable energy on the grid. For example, an electric vehicle recharging overnight has a lot of flexibility to decide specifically when it’s pulling electricity to charge the vehicle and when it wants to “wait” for the grid to get cleaner.

For certain, Michigan’s electricity sector air quality concerns won’t turn around overnight. But this year’s 50% clean energy target agreement and what it means for toxic air pollution and human and environmental impacts means that there’s a good sightline to clearer skies ahead. And here at WattTime, we’re equally excited about the role that flexible demand can play for enabling smart devices to automatically and effortlessly choose cleaner energy, in the process helping Michigan make ever greater progress in its journey toward cleaner air.

Clean energy portfolios could be an avoided emissions juggernaut

By Peter Bronski

In early January, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued a ruling that might well prove to be a bellwether for natural gas-fired power plants: the CPUC directed one of the state’s investor-owned utilities to procure energy storage and/or preferred resources such as demand response and distributed solar to replace three existing gas plants (two gas peakers and a 580-megawatt combined cycle plant).

In the months since, we’ve come to know such combinations of energy storage, flexible demand, and distributed energy resources such as rooftop and community solar by another name: clean energy portfolios. And the idea that these clean energy portfolios could be both technologically and economically competitive with natural gas power plants represents a landmark shift for the market.

That shift now appears to be on the precipice of a major inflection point, per a new report released late last month by Rocky Mountain Institute, The Economics of Clean Energy Portfolios. A team from RMI analyzed four planned natural gas power plants in different regions of the U.S. and evaluated instead replacing them with portfolios of renewables, energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and storage.

More than 100 gigawatts of new, announced natural gas power plants are planned for the U.S. through 2025. Extrapolating retirements and anticipated further new builds through 2030, that “rush to gas” comes with a hefty price tag, locking in $1 trillion in combined infrastructure investment and fuel costs (just over half for capex, the remainder for opex). It also comes with a massive emissions footprint: 5 billion tons of CO2 through 2030 and 16 billion tons through the 20-year lifetimes of those gas plants.

Could clean energy portfolios obviate such as a costly scenario? According to RMI’s analysis, yes. And incorporating WattTime insights and capabilities into those portfolios could make their emissions benefits even greater.

The four real-world scenarios RMI evaluated included:

The corresponding clean energy portfolios varied according to the local grid mix and the primary services they needed to deliver (e.g., baseload capacity, peaking capacity, flexibility/ramping). The portfolios ranged from half wind paired with some storage and energy efficiency to three-quarters flexible demand paired with smaller slices of solar, storage, and efficiency.

“The biggest factor influencing portfolios in each region was the compatibility of local renewable resources with regional load profiles,” explains Mark Dyson, a principal at RMI and one of the lead authors of the new report. “For example, the West Coast region has significant existing solar, so the clean energy portfolio we modeled there relies heavily on new wind to balance solar production. In contrast, we found that new solar in Florida was very valuable for meeting mid-day loads in a state without as much existing solar capacity.”

Even with RMI’s conservative assumptions, the economics were impressive—from essentially net present cost parity in some scenarios (i.e., plus/minus 10%) to substantial savings of 40–60% in other scenarios—prompting media outlets such as Forbes to declare “the ‘rush to gas’ will strand billions as renewables get cheaper.”

“Given the cost declines in renewables and battery storage in recent years, it's not surprising that the economics look good for clean energy portfolios today. What's surprising is how fast the economics turn even better, and the stark implications for investment in new natural gas infrastructure,” Dyson adds.

The emissions side of the story may prove even more profound than the economic one. Clearly, in each of the four scenarios RMI analyzed, the clean energy portfolios avoid the fossil-fueled emissions that would come onto the grid if each of those natural gas plants gets built. Over the 20-year life of those plants, the savings range from 1–2 million tons of cumulative CO2 to upwards of 66 million tons. Across the four scenarios alone, the savings total more than 90 million tons. Total nationwide savings could reach 16 billion tons.

There are likely even further emissions savings available for the taking. For starters, replacing a natural gas power plant with a clean energy portfolio changes where those megawatts of generation sit in the merit order dispatch stack, the order by which grid operators call upon supply-side resources to meet electricity demand. The generator that fulfills the last megawatt of demand is known as the marginal generator.

Renewables generally sit first in the stack, thanks to their near-zero marginal operating costs (e.g., no fuel costs vs. fossil-fueled plants). This means that clean energy portfolios further build up the renewably-generated bottom of the merit order dispatch stack and thus potentially push even more fossil-fueled marginal generation out the top of the stack, above and beyond obviating the new-build gas plant. These “bonus” avoided marginal emissions will vary by location and its local grid mix, but they are very much real.

Further, RMI’s assemblage of clean energy portfolios includes a healthy mix of flexible demand, which equals up to three-quarters of the pie in the case of the Florida portfolio. This represents yet another opportunity to avoid emissions. That’s because how clean or dirty the grid’s electricity is varies across the hours of the day and night, depending on which generation sources are providing the electricity.

When WattTime-enabled smart devices such as thermostats, grid-interactive water heaters, electric vehicles, and others are enabled with the right software signal, they can automatically and effortlessly use their flexible demand to arbitrage clean and dirty grid times, choosing to consume electricity when generation is cleaner and to avoid energy consumption when it’s dirtier. In places where there’s both legacy dirty generation and a sizeable chunk of clean, variable renewable generation, the per-kWh opportunity to shave emissions can be huge.

So what’s next for making the promise of clean energy portfolios a reality? “The path forward requires solving some of the ‘soft cost’ challenges of integrating multiple technologies to meet grid needs,” says RMI’s Dyson. “In particular, customer acquisition costs for energy efficiency and demand response programs can be significant. WattTime-enabled demand flexibility can improve the customer value proposition and help scale deployment of demand-side resources.”

The net takeaway is that clean energy portfolios present a compelling cost-competitive, emissions-less alternative to new natural gas power plants and they can unlock even greater emissions-reduction benefits. This is exciting. As renewable energy continues its rapid growth, the grid’s decarbonization could accelerate even faster ahead of renewables’ megawatts expansion.

How to save a United States' worth of carbon emissions

As Renewables Surge, They Can Do More, With a 4 Gigaton Opportunity Right Under Their Noses

By Matt Evans and Chiel Borenstein

Pick up any newspaper today, and there are stories that might make you worry. But one bright spot has been the continuing Cinderella story of renewable energy worldwide. When WattTime was founded only a few years ago, renewable energy deployment every year was barely more than a footnote in the global economy. No more. According to January 2018 numbers from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, world clean energy investment totaled $333.5 billion in 2017. That’s a 3% increase vs. 2016 and the second-highest annual investment total ever. Cumulative investment since 2010 has reached an impressive $2.5 trillion.

Investment focused on solar (48% of the global total), then wind, then energy-smart technologies (including smart meters, battery storage, smart grid, and electric vehicles), then all other clean energy technologies (which collectively ranked a very distant fourth).

The United States, for its part, ranked second globally behind only China. That clean energy investment helped to propel the U.S. to its third consecutive year of emissions declines, dropping by 0.5% in 2017.

Domestically and internationally, these are encouraging developments about which to be rightfully optimistic. Yet if we want to beat climate change before we reach the tipping point, we need to move even faster. It’s time for renewables to seize the moment and up their game. At WattTime, we have discovered a way they can do just that.

Tackling the Carbon Emissions Elephant in the Room

Back in November 2017, Carbon Brief—a UK-based climate science journalism site—reported on some alarming findings from the Global Carbon Project: after a three-year plateau, global annual carbon emissions were forecasted to rise by an estimated 2% by the end of the year.

Last month, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) confirmed those initial estimates in IEA’s inaugural Global Energy & CO2 Status Report. The verdict? In 2017, global energy-related CO2 emissions rose 1.4% to a record-high 32.5 gigatons.

Looking ahead to the rest of 2018, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) March 2018 release of its Short-Term Energy Outlook, U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions are expected to rise by 1.0% in 2018, followed by another 0.8% in 2019.

In the wake of the Paris Agreement, it all could be seen as a discouraging setback in the race to decarbonize the energy sector. But rather than despair, there is reason for hope. Renewables in particular have an opportunity to make each new clean MW go further. Here’s how.

The 4 Gigaton Opportunity Sitting Under Renewables’ Noses

People typically think of solar, wind, and other clean-energy projects as just creating zero-emissions energy, making them in some sense all the same. But upon closer inspection, not all renewable energy is actually created equal. After all, the way that renewables help the environment is that they displace dirty energy. So, the same wind turbine can actually have radically different impacts on the environment and the electricity grid’s emissions depending on whether it’s displacing, say, a coal plant, or another windmill.

Thus, as is often noted in matters of real estate, when it comes to renewable energy deployment, location matters. Where developers site new renewable generation can greatly influence which kinds of energy they displace, and therefore how much carbon emissions those clean electrons ‘erase.’ As it turns out, the size of that prize is large. Very large.

Recently, the WattTime team crunched the numbers from the U.S. EIA’s International Energy Outlook 2017, which forecasts world energy generation and consumption through 2040. The results were very surprising to our team.

If the global distribution of new renewable energy generation forecasted to be built through 2030 were redistributed geographically to optimize for avoided emissions, it could save an estimated 4 gigatons (Gt) of carbon emissions over the life of those renewable energy projects. That number is nearly equal to the annual carbon emissions of the United States.

And the impact could easily be far greater. Renewable energy capacity additions have routinely far surpassed the U.S. EIA’s projections in past years, so 4 Gt—big as that number is—could merely be the starting point.

This is an incredible “free” opportunity. Think again about the implications: holding renewable energy investment and new MW of clean generation constant—and optimizing solely on location for the sake of avoided emissions—renewables that are already planned could vastly multiply their impact.

Such an opportunity is squarely within reach. It is now incumbent on utilities, renewable energy developers, renewable energy buyers, and others to add a new lens to their clean energy investment and deployment. Alongside dollars and MW we should now also include location-optimized avoided emissions. A United States’ worth of carbon emissions are on the line and available for the taking.

Not all renewables are created equal: quantifying the emissions benefits of institutional renewable energy purchasing options

By Gavin McCormick and Chiel Borenstein, in partnership with Jaclyn Olsen and Caroleen Verly from the Harvard University Office for Sustainability and Chad Laurent from Meister Consultants Group (A Cadmus Company)

In recent years, institutional climate action targets, renewable energy subsidies, and the rapidly falling costs of wind and solar have led more and more large institutions to begin purchasing significant quantities of off-site renewable energy. The practice has grown rapidly, from 70 megawatts purchased in 2012 to over 2,780 megawatts, as of February 2018. Naturally, all these new renewables are reducing pollution. But…exactly how much pollution?

The Boston Green Ribbon Commission Higher Education Working Group, an alliance of leading sustainability-minded institutions, aimed to find out. The Working Group’s chair, Harvard University, partnered with Meister Consultants Group (a Cadmus Company), and RMI subsidiary WattTime to conduct a study exploring methods for quantifying the actual emissions impacts of institutional renewable energy purchases. The results were intriguing.

Notably, the study, entitled Institutional Renewable Energy Procurement: Quantitative Impacts Addendum, found that the answers may be less straightforward than they initially appear. Evidently, not all renewable energy projects are equally effective at reducing emissions. (Currently, the most common emissions accounting framework treats all renewable energy projects as equally reducing emissions.) Better measuring this variation of impact between projects could soon create new opportunities for renewable energy buyers to begin reducing emissions even faster, more cheaply, more reliably, and more credibly due to the new evidence-based approach.

The Higher Education Working Group—consisting of Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston—had already been active in illuminating and streamlining institutional renewable energy purchasing. In 2016, the group authored a report in partnership with Meister Consultants Group offering detailed background information on renewable energy procurement options, as well as guidance on impact claims for institutions already making or looking to make renewable energy purchases.

While attending an RMI Business Renewables Center (BRC) member event, Jaclyn Olsen, Associate Director of Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (OFS), met Gavin McCormick, co-founder and Executive Director of Watt Time, and became intrigued by the work WattTime was doing on quantifying carbon impacts of renewable purchases. Jaclyn proposed a partnership to build on the research that the Working Group had already done on the topic, and the result was a collaboration between OFS, WattTime and Meister Consultants Group to create a report for the Working Group members that brought this new way of assessing emissions reduction impacts from renewable purchases to potential purchasers.

Three Ways to Count Emissions

Most institutions today report their greenhouse gas emissions using the carbon footprinting approach, as laid out in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP). While the process involves multiple methods, hierarchies of emissions factors, and other complexities, at a high level it’s a simple approach: Organizations count how much regular electricity they purchase from the grid, subtract off the amount of renewable energy they purchase, and multiply the remainder by the average emissions intensity of the local grid. This framework allows for straightforward comparison of renewable energy commitments across institutions; however it does not differentiate between varying carbon impacts of different renewable energy projects.

Before we describe the study’s findings, it is important to note that carbon footprinting is not the only way to measure emissions. The Quantitative Impacts Addendum study identifies three different ways institutions can measure the emissions impacts of renewable energy purchases: (1) the status quo, carbon footprinting; (2) avoided emissions; and (3) quantification through the generation of carbon offsets. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks.

The study’s primary goal was to uncover the implications of these differences, so that institutions making renewable energy purchasing decisions will have a broader and deeper understanding of the emissions impacts of the projects they are considering.

1) The Status Quo: Counting Megawatt-hours, Not Emissions

The simplicity of carbon footprinting comes at a cost. The GHGP is very explicit that this approach measures the change in emissions that an institution “owns” in an abstract accounting sense, not necessarily the actual real-world emissions reductions caused by renewable energy purchases.

The reason this distinction matters is that the real-world emissions reductions can vary widely. After all, adding renewable energy to the grid only reduces emissions if it displaces existing power plants. But which power plants are displaced? A renewable energy project that displaces mostly coal will reduce considerably more emissions than one that displaces natural gas, or even other emissions-free resources like hydropower.

2) A Measurement Change: Avoided Emissions

The avoided emissions method is also defined under the GHGP, and is classified as an optional calculation. This method establishes a framework for measuring not megawatt-hours, but emissions. By measuring which existing or future power plants a renewable energy project displaces, it measures the actual emissions impacts of a project.

Employing this methodology, the differences in emissions impacts between renewable energy projects can be substantial. The report finds that renewable energy purchases by Boston area schools could reduce anywhere from 791 to 2,187 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour—nearly a 300% variation among projects of identical size—depending on the power plant being displaced.

It’s important to note that while the GHGP allows organizations to measure avoided emissions, the GHGP does not allow organizations to use these calculations in their main emissions inventory. So organizations that declare carbon targets and choose to voluntarily define them in terms of the emissions inventory cannot use the avoided emissions method. This could lead to a situation where the claimed emissions reduction is higher or lower than a more accurately calculated value.

3) Carbon Offsets: Counting Emissions Towards Declared Targets

Unlike the avoided emissions methods, projects measured using carbon offsets can be “counted” towards an institution’s official emission inventory. To ensure the integrity of that system, projects are only eligible for carbon offsets if they pass a series of tests that they are valid and additional (truly reducing emissions beyond what would have occurred in the project’s absence). While ensuring the highest levels of accuracy, the carbon offset process is also much more time-consuming and administratively burdensome than the avoided emissions approach. It is also very difficult to prove additionality for renewable energy projects, so many renewable energy projects will not be eligible.

Pros and Cons of Each Method

There are clearly pros and cons to each approach. In determining which method to use, key factors institutions could consider include the following:

Where Next?

The main reasons to measure emissions are 1) to ascertain as accurately as possible whether we are collectively moving towards the emissions reductions we all know are needed, and 2) to allow actors to make accurate comparisons of the impacts of different choices.

When some institutions are using one method and others are using a different method, it is difficult to accurately compare the impact of different individual actions, and to calculate the collective impact. There is a need for a clear and consistent way for institutions to accurately measure the impacts of renewable purchases. It would certainly be possible for the GRC Higher Education Working Group member institutions to collectively define a new standard that draws the best elements out of the three methods and discards the drawbacks. Regardless of the method schools select (or create), acting together maximizes transparency and reduces administrative costs. The report recommends that whatever the Working Group decides, the members collectively decide it together.

Do you really know where your electricity is coming from?

Four years ago, I was part of a group of graduate students from UC Berkeley and software engineers from Google and Climate Corporation who met at a hackathon. We unexpectedly discovered that by pooling combined skills, we could solve a problem that hadn’t been cracked. For the first time, we could know when we flip on a light switch exactly that power comes from.

We wanted to know this because with the rise of energy storage and smart devices, it was getting easier and easier for us to automatically set our equipment to use energy at any particular time we liked. But as environmentalists, we were struck that no one had ever answered this question: if I want to run a device when the grid is providing the cleanest energy, “watt time” is that?

We knew that, more and more often, power grids were experiencing brief moments of surplus clean energy. But when? To find out, we built our own software tool to determine—in real time—where our power was coming from. Soon, we had an app that could tell us specific times that we could use, say, our own laundry machines so that they would be running on surplus wind power. We were thrilled to become the first people on a modern power grid to not just passively consume energy, but to actively choose where and how our energy was being made.

Afterwards, we marveled that it had been so effortless to choose clean energy at the simple press of a button. But although the technology could let anyone just say no to polluting, it didn’t save any money. And as the economists well knew, no energy technology had ever scaled that didn’t save money. We assumed that was the end of it.

But the team couldn’t stop thinking about it, and more and more volunteers with deep technical expertise in the energy industry joined the effort. We started hearing from team members with day jobs at the World Resources Institute, the U.S. Department of Energy, Navigant, MIT, Stanford, PG&E, and countless other institutions. Two hundred and thirty volunteers and a lot of customer research later, we belatedly realized we had been wrong. People wanted this technology. A lot of people.

They showed us just how many thermostats, appliances, batteries, lighting systems, and other types of commercial devices—23 billion of them worldwide—were connecting to the internet in order to make smart choices. Nearly every one of those devices could be “WattTime-enabled” to effortlessly, instantly allow its owner to choose energy that fit the owner’s values. And because it ran in the cloud, our solution was fully capable of cutting the carbon footprint of a million-device fleet in minutes.

Stunned by the potential impact, we decided to build a system we call automated emissions reduction (AER). AER distills the massively complex problem of identifying where your power comes from into receiving a simple data feed that can be read by a smart device with the addition of two lines of code. With AER, WattTime is making consuming cleaner energy simple, effortless, cheap, and automatic.

Our earliest AER implementations automatically reduced emissions from humble electric golf carts for the UC Merced sustainability team. We steadily progressed to automatically reducing emissions from refrigerators, then air handlers, and soon, entire building energy management systems for UC Berkeley.

Over time, we began working more and more with one of the most respected institutions in sustainability, Rocky Mountain Institute. RMI carefully validated our algorithms, examined our code and our potential impact, and helped us workshop the fledgling AER industry with 60 interested organizations in Chicago in spring 2017.

Today we are thrilled to announce that, after thoroughly vetting the tech, RMI has both validated our work and decided to bet big on it. This week, RMI is formally incorporating WattTime as a subsidiary organization. We’ve gone from a team of volunteers to a nonprofit tech startup with a mission to allow the most accurate and credible measurement possible of emissions reductions. And we will benefit from the resources, the network, and the objectivity of the RMI team.

This partnership is a match made in heaven. RMI’s high-level vision of a next-generation, customer-centric electricity system aligns perfectly with WattTime’s dogged pursuit of a disruptive technology solution that gives anyone who uses energy—from people to large corporations—the right and the tools to choose for themselves how their energy should be made.

A concept launched by a small team of committed volunteers has become a reality and a movement around a common-sense idea: electricity users need the freedom to choose their power. Microsoft has joined our efforts, as have sustainability leaders from Kaiser Permanente to the City of Austin. Will you join us?

Email us today at contact@watttime.org

Gavin McCormick is cofounder and executive director of WattTime.

Beyond energy efficiency – using the power of data to find the cleanest hours of the day

By Rob Bernard, Josh Henretig, TJ DiCaprio -- Microsoft
Originally posted on the Microsoft Green Blog

On an average morning, you turn off your alarm, turn on the lights, power on your smartphone that was charging overnight, take a hot shower, make a cup of coffee, all while watching the local news. This morning routine is all powered by electricity. The green-minded citizen will turn those lights and appliances off quickly, take a shorter shower, and make sure everything is off before leaving the house. Taking those energy-efficient steps is helpful.

But what if you wanted to do more to help the environment by changing not only how much energy you consume, but what kind of energy you consume? That’s a bit more challenging. At present, most households have no choice or ability to directly influence their individual energy mix—but thanks to big data that’s all about to change.

The Smart Energy Azure Demonstration platform is a user-friendly platform available to anyone with an Azure subscription. The solution builds on the tremendously innovative work done by WattTime. Their API provides data on generation mix down to the megawatts generated from each fuel source; average carbon emissions; and marginal carbon emissions, which is the part of the carbon footprint that you can actually affect by using or conserving energy at a particular place and time. And because the grid’s energy mix changes based on the weather, the platform also pulls in global weather data and forecasts from the Wunderground API.

With data sets customized to their local power grids, consumers can make much more informed decisions about how to adjust their energy consumption and cut energy costs. But knowing this information is just the beginning. By combining these insights with a Microsoft IoT suite that will enable users to sync their home devices with the system’s data, users will soon be able to optimize the energy use of their homes in real time. (The steps for getting the system up and running are clearly detailed in the GitHub page for the solution.) By doing this, households can leverage new solutions, like smart thermostats and smart home apps, to tailor their individual energy use even further and proactively align with times of the day when more clean energy is available on the grid.

These small changes can make a big impact. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), enabling water heaters and air conditioners to adjust their timing just slightly could reduce carbon emissions in the United States by over six million metric tons per year—the equivalent of taking one million cars off the road. In addition, RMI found that carbon emissions from loads connected to the PJM grid in Chicago, IL, can be reduced by 5 to 15 percent simply by prioritizing energy usage for periods when coal plants are not on the margin.

To put this theory into practice, we’re working to test the Smart Energy Azure Demonstration platform in enterprise-level applications, like universities. This year, we’re teaming up with Princeton University on a “Marginal Carbon Emissions Project” to see how the platform performs in a larger, multi-building campus setting and to co-develop new projects, including one that would allow the university to measure the CO2 emissions of using the grid compared to tapping Princeton’s onsite power generation at any given time. This will allow the university to further customize its energy utilization and drive daily efficiency.

At Microsoft, our goal is to empower our customers with the tools and technology to achieve more, sustainably. We’re excited by the potential of this and other new technology to help consumers make more informed energy decisions by bringing data to their fingertips—so that running a greener home is as easy as making your morning coffee.

Combating climate change by measuring carbon emissions correctly

By Jamie Mandel and Gavin McCormick. Originally posted on RMI Outlet.

Carbon emissions are arguably the most important thing for our society to learn how to manage in the coming years. The largest single source of U.S. carbon emissions is our electricity system. And yet, we do not measure emissions from our electricity use correctly, meaning we cannot manage our emissions effectively.

But now, thanks to a new technology that accurately measures moment-to-moment carbon emissions on our electricity system, we can unlock a whole host of new opportunities to manage emissions creatively and with less effort. With new software that automatically tracks the actual emissions impacts associated with specific actions on the electricity system, both in real time and ahead of time, we can now use our appliances at times when our electricity is the cleanest.

End-use flexibility

Many uses of electricity have inherent flexibility—that is, the timing can be changed by small or large amounts without impacting the quality of the service that device is providing. As Rocky Mountain Institute explored in The Economics of Demand Flexibility, harnessing this flexibility can save consumers and companies money while lowering grid costs.

The same is true of carbon emissions—harnessing the flexibility of end-use devices can make them run, on average, 15 percent cleaner than a “dumb” device, at no cost or quality impacts for the end-user.

Millions of people and thousands of corporations try every day to manage their carbon emissions. Unfortunately, much of this effort occurs without measuring these emissions correctly. Personal and corporate efforts to manage carbon emissions from electricity typically happen in one of two ways:

1) Wthout any measurement, by focusing on efforts that are generally associated with reduced emissions. For example, many corporations invest in things like efficiency, solar PV, and grid-sourced clean energy, but do not attempt to quantify the emissions savings associated with specific investments.

2) With coarse measurement of average emissions intensity, primarily by using eGrid historical data to estimate averages for electricity-related emissions. For example, a corporation might deliberately site a data center at a location on the grid that is, on average, cleaner than other options and claim some associated carbon emissions savings.

Thanks to new technology, it is now possible instead to know the actual emissions impacts associated with specific actions at a specific place on the electricity system, in real time—and even ahead of time through predictive algorithms. More importantly, it is now possible to assess future decisions based on marginal—rather than average—emissions factors, which, according to most economists, is the correct way to properly understand emissions impacts.

The emissions hidden in the margins

The difference between average and marginal emissions factors can be very large, and quite important. An average factor refers to the amount of emissions generated over a given time, divided by the amount of energy produced in that time. For example, the U.S. Pacific Northwest gets most of its electricity from hydropower, a low-emissions energy resource, and thus its average emissions factor is very low.

A marginal emissions factor refers to rate at which emissions would change with a small change to electricity load. Continuing the simplified Pacific Northwest example, imagine a time when hydropower is providing 75 percent of the region’s power and gas-fired power plants are providing the remaining 25 percent. This means that the average emissions factor of power in the Pacific Northwest would be very clean, at 25 percent the emissions intensity of natural gas (approximately 210 lbs. CO2 per megawatt-hour (MWh)). So at first glance, a great way to reduce a company’s or a person’s carbon footprint would be to move to the Pacific Northwest, where the electricity is very clean.

Yet in many cases, natural gas is the marginal resource, meaning that if a new kilowatt-hour of electricity is needed at a certain time, it will be provided by natural gas. So a company or an individual moving to the Pacific Northwest would increase carbon emissions at a rate equal to 100 percent of natural gas (840 lbs. CO2 per MWh)—a very big difference! Thinking in marginal rather than average carbon emissions can dramatically affect a company’s or a person’s choice of optimal environmental impact.

Estimating emissions impacts based on average emissions factors can have these types of effects on a recurring basis, across the U.S. This is because the portfolio of generators dispatching energy into the grid changes every five to 15 minutes, changing the marginal resource. For example, Midwest utilities mostly burn coal at night; if you own an electric vehicle there, you would have lower CO2 emissions if you deliberately charged it during the day. On the other hand, California’s electricity market has more efficient gas plants on the margin at night than during the day, so you should charge your electric vehicle (EV) in the evening to minimize your CO2 emissions. And with an Internet-connected EV charger, you can cut emissions even further with micro-timing. For example, you can time the EV charging to shut down when less-efficient peaking plants briefly kick on (say when the wind subsides or a cloud passes over), and turn it back on five minutes later when the wind returns or the cloud moves on and the marginal generator is cleaner.

Things you can do when you account for carbon emissions correctly

Accounting for carbon emissions correctly unlocks a whole host of new emissions-management opportunities. You can:

RMI and WattTime are working together to measure carbon emissions correctly and reduce them cost-effectively.

WattTime is a California-based nonprofit that has developed software to accurately forecast carbon emissions on the margin, in real time. This data can be used to control the timing of device charging, apply carbon emissions data to the models that renewable energy developers use to site projects, provide strategic advice to corporations on how to most cost-effectively reduce emissions, and provide more accurate reporting and verification of emissions.

RMI is using this new technological tool to unlock new markets for carbon reduction, and to maximize the value of these reductions. This technology can be used to improve the profitability of distributed energy resource companies and retail energy providers by lowering customer acquisition costs, accelerating corporate sustainability efforts, and improving the way that carbon emissions are measured and, ultimately, priced.

For example, 240 EV customers nationwide are charging their EVs with cleaner energy than their neighbors. Thousands of thermostat customers in Chicago are learning that cooling their houses with fewer carbon emissions is as easy as pushing a button. By using WattTime, millions of independent devices can be seamlessly checking the emissions content of the grid and making small decisions about the timing of electricity use to lower carbon emissions.

A key founding principle at RMI is that people don’t want raw kilowatt-hours. They want hot showers, cold beer, and illumination. Similarly, the planet doesn’t care how many kilowatt-hours we reduce. It cares how much we reduce CO2 emissions. So why not start measuring them directly? Together, we will help people and companies easily reduce their carbon emissions to help create a world that’s thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, for ever.