Corporate sustainability requires impactful clean energy investments

GreenFront Energy Partners and WattTime partner to advance emissionality

Joint effort will unlock greater emissions reductions by enabling renewable PPAs to target grid regions where clean energy can displace more fossil-fueled emissions

Wind turbines in agricultural field with WattTime and GreenFront logos

Richmond, Va. and Oakland, Calif.—October 12, 2021—Today clean energy-focused investment banking and advisory firm GreenFront Energy Partners and environmental tech nonprofit WattTime announced a new partnership to advance emissionality as an offering for GreenFront’s clients. Emissionality brings an additional lens to renewable energy procurement, by enabling investors and offtakers to identify which solar and wind projects can achieve the greatest emissions reductions, by displacing more fossil-fueled generation on dirtier grids. This will directly enhance GreenFront’s PPA Advisory practice, which represents corporate buyers in their renewable energy procurement efforts.

“Each energy buyer comes to the table with a different set of goals and priorities for their renewable energy procurement, from economic considerations to social and community impact, to environmental variables,” explained Adam Hahn, GreenFront Energy Partners. “But more and more, we’re seeing growing emphasis on maximizing beneficial climate impact, by signing renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs) for those solar and wind projects that achieve greater emissions reductions. Through our partnership with WattTime, we’re able to bring industry-leading emissionality insights to our clients.”

GreenFront and WattTime previously collaborated in support of Nucor, the largest steel producer in North America. GreenFront’s PPA Advisory helped Nucor evaluate a large portfolio of responses to its renewable energy RFP, and brought in WattTime to conduct an emissionality analysis to better understand the avoided emissions benefits of a set of finalists. WattTime has also worked with organizations ranging from Boston University to Salesforce to incorporate emissionality into their renewables procurement strategies.

“The growing adoption of emissionality is an exciting trend in corporate renewables procurement,” said Laura Corso, managing director of partnerships at WattTime. “Companies looking to maximize the emissions-reduction benefits of their renewable energy investments understand that not all solar and wind projects are created equally. We couldn’t be more excited for this partnership with GreenFront . With the urgency of the climate crisis, GreenFront is better-positioned than ever to help their clients focus their investments where they can achieve impact.”

For more information about emissionality and GreenFront’s PPA Advisory practice, please visit www.greenfrontenergy.com.

About GreenFront Energy Partners
GreenFront Energy Partners is an investment banking firm that specializes in alternative energy financial advisory. GreenFront’s service offering includes buy-side and sell-side M&A advisory and debt and equity capital raising, as well as PPA advisory services.

About WattTime
WattTime is an environmental tech nonprofit that empowers all people, companies, policymakers, and countries to slash emissions and choose cleaner energy. Founded by UC Berkeley researchers, we develop data-driven tools and policies that increase environmental and social good, including Automated Emissions Reduction and emissionality. WattTime is also the convening member and cofounder of the global Climate TRACE coalition. During the energy transition from a fossil-fueled past to a zero-carbon future, WattTime ‘bends the curve’ of emissions reductions to realize deeper, faster benefits for people and the planet.

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WattTime Partners with Salesforce to Incorporate ‘Emissionality’ into Renewable Energy Procurement Strategy

Oakland, Calif.—October 21, 2020—Today environmental tech nonprofit WattTime announced that Salesforce.com, Inc. (Salesforce) has begun incorporating emissionality, a practice developed by the nonprofit, as a key criteria in its renewable energy procurement strategy. Emissionality is a technique to make large-scale renewable energy projects even more impactful by deliberately siting them in locations where building new renewables displaces particularly polluting power plants. This strategic shift is highlighted in Salesforce’s new white paper, More Than A Megawatt: Embedding Social & Environmental Impact in the Renewable Energy Procurement Process. WattTime previously applied the emissionality approach with Boston University and others to help the university maximize the positive impact of a renewable energy power purchase agreement.

“Since 2012, the scientific consensus has been clear that some renewable energy projects drive up to three times more positive environmental impact than others. Salesforce just became the first major renewable energy buyer to publicly outline how it is incorporating that science into its renewable procurement decision-making,” said Gavin McCormick, WattTime Executive Director. “This is an incredibly heartening development for environmentalists everywhere. It makes sense it would be Salesforce. They were an early leader in the corporate renewable energy movement—setting a 100% renewable energy target back in 2013—and now they’ve stepped out in front once again with a compelling articulation of the role of emissionality in the renewable energy procurement process.”

Emissionality works by analyzing what will happen on the grid in response to different potential new renewable energy projects being built. One of the most-important factors is the location-specific grid mix where new renewable capacity is built and how their addition influences avoided emissions and human health benefits from displacing dirty fossil-fueled generation. Based on analysis from WattTime and other organizations, Salesforce will now consider which potential purchases would have the greatest benefit to the environment and human health—among several important criteria—before making renewable energy purchases. Because some projects can be far more environmentally beneficial than others, this approach will make it possible for Salesforce to ‘supercharge’ the environmental impact of every renewable energy purchase the company makes.

For example, a recent WattTime analysis found that electricity from a solar project built in West Virginia could have 3x greater impact than electricity from an almost identical project built in California. If widely adopted, the technique has potential to drive considerable environmental impact. A separate WattTime analysis found that if forecasted new renewable energy capacity worldwide began deliberately building in the highest-impact locations, this change would save a United States’ worth of emissions.

“As a company, we’ve been taking a hard look at what makes ‘the best’ renewable energy project,” explained Megan Lorenzen, sustainability manager at Salesforce. “Purchasing renewable energy is about much more than adding new megawatts of renewable energy to the grid. It's about improving the state of the world, which includes considering a number of factors such as land use impacts, wildlife impacts, equity issues, community benefits, and WattTime’s emissionality work, which spans both avoided emissions from a climate perspective and human health considerations for air pollution.”

Salesforce partnered with WattTime, the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife, CERES, the Nature Conservancy, and others on its More Than A Megawatt strategy.

About WattTime
WattTime is a nonprofit with a software tech startup DNA, dedicated to giving everyone everywhere the power to choose cleaner energy. We invented Automated Emissions Reduction (AER), a technique to reduce the carbon footprint of IoT devices and energy storage equipment; and pioneered emissionality, a technique to increase the emissions benefits of renewable energy.

We power these technologies with cutting-edge insights and algorithms, coupled with machine learning, to shift the timing and place of electricity use and generation to better line up with times and places where it drives the most impact.

WattTime was founded by PhD researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2017 became a subsidiary of Rocky Mountain Institute. WattTime is a founding member of Climate TRACE, a global coalition working together to monitor nearly all human-caused GHG emissions worldwide independently and in real time.

CONTACT
Peter Bronski, Inflection Point Agency for WattTime
1.201.575.5545 | peterbronski@inflectionpointagency.com

Image: Denys Nevozhai | Unsplash

New report from WattTime and First Solar explores how two key factors can determine the emissions impact of solar projects

If you’ve ever been on either end of a real estate deal, you’ve probably heard this old saying: “location, location, location.” This potentially overused adage imparts some obvious but useful lessons. For example, if you’re a small business owner investing in a new store, buying in one part of town versus another can be a complete game changer for how much money you’re able to make and how many people your business can reach, even if the service you’re providing in either location is identical.

The same concept holds true for solar projects and potential avoided carbon emissions. In fact, our research has shown geographic location to be the most important factor in determining the emissions impact of a new renewable energy project.

The idea is fairly simple: If you build a new solar farm in a region that’s already saturated with—and maybe even curtailing surplus—solar energy, it won’t reduce grid emissions nearly as much as a solar farm built in a region still mainly reliant on coal-fired electricity. What you displace matters, and our goal is to displace high-emissions electricity generators. At WattTime, we call this concept “emissionality,” and according to our research, using the practice of emissionality when siting new renewables projects can help us avoid up to 380 percent more greenhouse gas emissions.

While location is clearly the heavy hitter of solar project optimization, there are other aspects to factor into the equation. One that we’ve recently taken a closer look at, along with our partners at utility-scale solar company First Solar, is the idea of “embodied emissions.” Different types of solar generation hardware cause different quantities of carbon emissions during production, deployment, and over their lifespans. For example, silicon technologies—especially monocrystalline—result in a higher emissions impact because of more emissions-intensive material and manufacturing requirements. But thin film technologies have a much lower emissions impact throughout their lifespans. By calculating the amount of avoided emissions achieved through strategic siting minus the emissions created through the lifespan of the technology deployed, we’re able to consider the overall net emissions impact of various projects.

A new report from WattTime and First Solar explores the net emissions impact of four common solar PV technologies in three different regions of the world with vastly different grid mixes—France, North Carolina, and California—across a typical 25-year lifespan. Spoiler alert: all the systems we tested had a net emissions reduction impact over a period of 25 years, but some were much better than others. The most dramatic swings in avoided emissions, as expected, were found when solar projects were placed in fossil-fuel-heavy grids compared to cleaner grids. Projects in North Carolina—where the marginal power generator is usually coal or natural gas—displace nearly 15 times more emissions than projects in France, where marginal generators are usually low-carbon.

But when working in relatively clean grids, using solar technologies with lower lifecycle embodied emissions helped make a great thing into an even greater thing. If we look again at France, using cadmium telluride technology instead of monocrystalline amplified net emissions reductions by a factor of nearly three.

As more of our electricity grids make the gradual transition from fossil fuels to renewables, thinking strategically about what technologies we use and where we put them can help us meet carbon reduction goals on or ahead of schedule. For more takeaways, as well as a deep-dive into lifecycle analysis and the concept of displaced emissions, download the full report.