In the coming months, WattTime, with the Great Lakes Protection Fund, UC Berkeley, and other partners, will be rolling out a pilot program to test the deployment of enhanced demand response programs throughout the Great Lakes Region. As a part of this pilot, we’re seeking a small group of commercial building owners who want to be able to choose clean energy in real-time, automatically. As early adopters for the program, you’ll gain this capability at no cost with just a software update to your existing control system. If your building is in a state that touches one of the Great Lakes (or your commercial HVAC/building controls company serves those buildings), you may be eligible.

• We’re partnering with building owners and property managers who want a choice about where their power comes from. Choosing to use AER is a choice to use cleaner electricity. AER will automatically make small adjustments to reduce your emissions throughout the day, all year long. Sign up today.
• We’re also partnering with building controls companies (e.g. automation, HVAC, lighting, analytics) who are interested in providing their customers the power to choose cleaner electricity. Contact us if you’d like to discuss the details.

WattTime lets you choose where your power comes from

WattTime invented automated emissions reduction (AER) to give electricity users the ability to choose the source of their power. WattTime measures the real-time emissions of your local power grid to determine how clean or dirty the responding generator is at the moment you flip on a switch. The answer can change every five minutes. Using WattTime’s forecast, your devices, homes, and buildings can automatically shift energy use to the cleanest moments throughout the day. AER is in use today by many devices like EV chargers, batteries, thermostats, appliances, smart plugs, and more. So if you want to be able to choose whether you use clean or dirty electricity, now you can, by using AER (learn more about AER).

Buildings can reduce Great Lakes pollution

Since 2015, WattTime and GLPF have been working to eliminate mercury and other pollution from the power sector by providing a powerful economic signal which will encourage clean energy generation and hasten the early retirement of dirty coal plants. Buildings are the next key piece of this puzzle. We’re scaling up the impact of our technology beyond EV charging and smart devices by expanding our capability to include commercial HVAC.

Early next year, WattTime will run a pilot demonstration of AER in a commercial building and measure the pollution reduction potential (a collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment). We will then share the results with utilities in the Great Lakes region (eg. ComEd, Xcel Energy, Great River Energy, DTE Energy, Consumers Energy) and beyond, in support of new incentive programs which will make AER more widely available.

The commercial building pilot is an important step towards bringing clean energy choice to everyone. By choosing cleaner energy for our homes and businesses, our collective action will add up to drastic reductions in pollution. For example, our two-phase project could lead to the elimination of 269 pounds of mercury annually in the Great Lakes region. We’ve previously discussed why reducing mercury pollution in the Great Lakes region is so important for health outcomes.

But why do we care? 

Health and environmental justice are intertwined, with the COVID-19 epidemic making that connection ever more stark and clear. With over a million deaths from the virus worldwide, we must not forget that health in lower-income communities is disproportionately affected not only by viruses, but by local environmental pollution which puts these populations at greater risk to increasingly frequent and coincident disasters.

New research from the State University of New York and ProPublica, as well as The New York Times, suggests that areas with bad air pollution have higher rates of COVID-19. Meanwhile, EPA enforcement has been cut back during the pandemic, leading to spikes in toxic emissions in some areas. Another recent study showed that asthma hospitalizations dropped in Kentucky after coal-fired power plants went offline.

This project focuses a lens on harmful pollutants emitted by coal-fired power plants, because every state that touches the Great Lakes has an interest in keeping their people safe with clean air and water. And, as the people who are directly impacted, we—and our buildings—can do something to help. 

HERE'S HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

Building Partners

We’re partnering with building owners and property managers who want a choice about where their power comes from. Choosing to use AER is a choice to use cleaner electricity. AER will automatically make small adjustments to reduce your emissions throughout the day, all year long. Sign up today.

Controls Partners

We’re also partnering with building controls companies (e.g. automation, HVAC, lighting, analytics) who are interested in providing their customers the power to choose cleaner electricity. Contact us if you’d like to discuss the details.

Roughly nine months into the global coronavirus pandemic, much has been written about the temporary—and potentially lasting—emissions reductions that have come along with stay-at-home orders and a deep economic recession. DNV GL’s recently released Energy Transitions Outlook 2020 forecasts 75 gigatons of avoided CO₂ emissions through 2050, mostly thanks to a big slump in energy demand that resets the trajectory of annual global emissions.

But a closer look at power grids and how they responded to falling demand shows that there’s more to the story—with implications for how we think about more-effective ways for slashing the emissions associated with our energy use.

WattTime analyst Christy Lewis focused her spotlight on the greater New York City metropolitan area of downstate New York, one of the early hotspots for COVID-19 in the United States. The New York City metro area—currently hosting its annual Climate Week—was hit hard and went into aggressive lockdown. What happened next in that region of the NYISO power grid was revealing.

Let’s zoom in to late March and early April 2020. Although just six months ago on the calendar, in ‘coronavirus time,’ that feels like it was eons ago. For context, the week spanning the March-April transition was also precisely when public interest in Netflix’s Tiger King peaked, which feels like it happened last century, so there’s that. 

By March, the pandemic had already been sweeping around the world, with global financial markets starting to tumble. On March 20, California became the first U.S. state to order its residents into stay-at-home lockdown. New York State followed two days later, on March 22. The story of life—and the economy—under lockdown is probably all-too-familiar to you already. But what transpired on New York’s power grid?

Answer: something curious.

For most of March, the rolling 7-day average of daily electricity demand and daily grid emissions tracked essentially in parallel. A ~7% drop in average daily load was accompanied by a similar ~7% drop in average daily grid emissions. Then the two curves diverged sharply. The next 7% decline in average daily load came along with a whopping 45% drop in average daily emissions. So what happened?

The answer lies in marginal generators and marginal emissions rates, and what they contributed to overall daily emissions.

New York is a state with bold decarbonization targets: 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 and a net-zero-carbon economy by 2050. But it’s not there yet. While upstate New York has made great strides with zero-emissions generation (mostly modern renewables such as wind and solar), downstate New York remains heavily dependent on fossil-fueled generation, which accounted for 69% of energy generation in 2019.

Yet as electricity demand rises or falls (mostly the latter, in this era of coronavirus), not all generators respond to that fluctuating demand like a swelling or receding of the tides in New York Harbor. Specific generators—the ones that are sitting ‘on the margin’ of demand—turn on or off, or ramp up or down, to maintain the supply-demand balance.

What we saw happening in those weeks of March and April was the byproduct of a simple fact of grid dispatch order: as electricity demand continued falling through late March and then into April, the marginal generators that were turning off were by and large the polluting, fossil-fueled ones. Even though demand declined gradually, New York’s downstate grid got a lot cleaner in the process. Data from WattTime’s analysis confirms as much: Throughout the first month of New York’s stay-at-home order, carbon-free generation remained a stalwart, supplying 7,500 to 8,500+ megawatts (MW) of capacity each day. Meanwhile, fossil-fueled generation plummeted, from supplying 5,500 MW of daily generating capacity at the start of lockdown to just 3,500 MW by mid-April.

So with economies around the country and around the world trying to rebound (or at least wanting to), what do we do with this insight? As energy demand climbs alongside economic activity, are we destined to see carbon emissions rise, too? Not necessarily.

In the same way that New York’s electricity demand and associated grid emissions decoupled in late March and early April thanks to the influence of marginal generators, so too do real-time grid emissions fluctuate all the time, not just during pandemic-induced global economic recessions. Every time you flick a light switch, plug in an electric vehicle to charge, schedule the battery from a residential solar+storage system in California to discharge… a marginal generator responds. And whether that marginal generator is surplus renewable energy or a polluting peaker plant can have a big influence on the emissions your energy use causes. Such fluctuations are most pronounced in grid regions amidst their fossil-to-renewable energy transition, where there’s a mix of clean and dirty generation.

Solutions like WattTime’s Automated Emissions Reduction (AER) technology harness this insight and convert it into a software signal that allows smart devices—thermostats, EVs, batteries, heat pumps, etc.—to sync their demand with moments of clean energy and avoid moments of dirty energy. Adopted at scale, it makes the kind of huge emissions reductions that downstate New York saw earlier this year achievable anytime, anywhere. 

We didn't need a global pandemic to find new examples of the deeper, faster emissions reductions right in front of us, but, well, here we are. Let's do something about it.

Image: Emiliano Bar | Unsplash

At this very moment, even the most-efficient appliances are sucking up energy indiscriminately from their local grid—clean, dirty, whatever’s on tap at the moment. Until recently, there’s been little choice in the matter. Now however, it’s possible to get choosy about how we power up the machines and devices we depend on, from electric vehicles to smart thermostats. And major utility providers are taking note.

Here at WattTime, we’ve been advancing a capability we call Automated Emissions Reduction (AER). It provides a software signal that allows smart energy-using devices, from EVs to thermostats, to sync with clean energy and avoid dirty energy. By operating with the intelligence of real-time marginal emissions data, our software tells devices if using power now (or later) will in-turn cause a high-emitting power plant to respond, or maybe zero-carbon wind or solar, and it automatically opts for those low or no-carbon moments. All this takes place with zero negative impact for the end user. The technology has increasingly been battled-tested and -proven.

Now, California utility PG&E has conducted a rigorous analysis of WattTime's AER software. The results? In short: AER works. The 50-plus-page assessment is no light read, but it indicates growing industry interest in effective new ways of meeting emissions-reduction targets and driving other strategic goals, like demand response programs and renewable integration.
Four device-level examples of AER in action To understand how AER supports broad utility strategy, it’s useful to consider first how AER works for the average device. PG&E’s analysis looked at four everyday appliances, in a laboratory setting, concluding that WattTime software effectively supports control of end-use energy consumption for each. By using AER technology to control their own versions of these appliances, people can…

1. Curb heating and cooling emissions with smart thermostat controls. Global energy demand for air conditioning is expected to triple by 2050, making AC one of the top drivers of global electricity demand in the years ahead, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). In California, for instance, PG&E notes that AC usage often coincides with higher GHG intensity on the grid. Meanwhile, the EIA residential energy survey reports that space heating accounts for roughly 15% of an average home’s annual energy use. So it’s meaningful that utilities can take more ownership over the kind of power people use to heat or cool their homes. With WattTime’s AER solution, PG&E simulations found that the average homeowner could trim HVAC-related emissions by 7.5–13.2% per year.
   
2. Maintain a water heater’s warmth, while cutting back on associated emissions. Water heating makes up 15% of a home’s energy use, according to the EIA survey cited above. With AER water heater load control, homeowners can make sure they’re using more of the clean energy that’s available from their utility. Per PG&E’s assessment, the water heater load controller “performed well” in controlling temperature and, in some cases, could reduce emissions by as much as 20% per day while maintaining desired water temperature.
   
3. Ease up on the refrigerator’s carbon footprint with an AER-powered smart plug. Refrigerators may be a quiet but steady energy suck, constituting about 7% of the average home’s energy use. But it’s a myth that they’re always consuming power. In fact, refrigerator compressors only have to consume power in little bursts of cooling that happen about every 30 minutes or so—during which time, the grid’s supply can vary greatly. AER can help find the cleanest five-minute period within that window, supporting demand-response programs while enabling homeowners to keep both food and appliance in good shape. In PG&E’s simulation, this approach cut carbon emissions by 1.3% on average per day.
   
4. Give EVs an instant ‘MPGe boost’ with AER service equipment. WattTime research shows that smart timing of EV charging can reduce associated emissions by as much as 20% annually, and up to 90% on some days. This will vary by location and grid. For example, PG&E’s California-based simulation team found they were able to shift charging time to achieve a 13% per day average reduction in GHG emissions.

The big picture: AER can help utilities achieve climate goals

Utilities working toward ambitious carbon emissions targets are increasingly seeing the broader benefits of adding AER to their toolbox.

For starters, AER aids renewable energy grid integration—and helps avert undesirable renewable energy curtailment—by using more surplus renewable energy. It does this not only by shifting flexible demand to windy and sunny times, but by especially targeting times when renewable energy is on the margin and at risk of being wasted.

AER also gets more out of demand response programs, especially when emissions rates and electricity prices are aligned. With AER, utilities can turn DR offerings into a year-round feature that truly appeal to customers. Our research shows AER boosts DR program enrollment and retention.

As California’s largest electric utility, PG&E’s report is another major affirmation that AER works not just for the individual devices people depend on everyday—but for the larger utilities that bring them to life, too. In a world of ever-more sophisticated demand response and renewable energy efforts, AER is proving a game-changing tool that grid operators can increasingly appreciate, and adopt.