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:

• Energy efficiency: reduce our energy use, as with the switch from incandescent to LED light bulbs
• Electrification: switch from direct burning of fossil fuels to electricity, as with the ongoing pivot from internal combustion engine automobiles to electric vehicles
• Decarbonization: make our electricity increasingly renewable and therefore emissions free
• Carbon capture, sequestration, and storage: pull carbon out of the atmosphere, whether through technological or biological means

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.

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.

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.