WattCarbon raises $1.5 million to enable 24/7 Carbon Free Energy tracking

LAFAYETTE, Calif., Dec. 14, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Lafayette, CA, based WattCarbon announced that it has closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round as it prepares to launch a platform that enables measurement of carbon emissions from energy use on a 24/7 basis. Participating in the round were Village Global, Looking Glass, Jetstream, Not-Boring Capital, Keiki Capital, as well as angel investors Chris Vargas, Greg Rudin, Aaron Vermut, Rick Stratton, and Tom Fogarty.

WattCarbon enables three types of temporal emissions tracking:

• Locational temporal emissions - carbon emissions associated with each kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed at each hour of the day
• Market temporal emissions - net carbon emitted taking into account power purchase agreements with offsite renewable energy producers
• Marginal temporal emissions - carbon emissions reduced by temporarily deviating from expected consumption patterns.

Leading companies as well as the U.S. Government are transitioning to 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) procurement. These commitments represent a departure from basic Renewable Energy Certificates or Scope 2 emissions reporting under the Greenhouse Gas Protocols, which only require simplified annual average values.

WattCarbon's co-founder and CEO, McGee Young who previously served as the CTO of Recurve, noted:

"Our team's experience developing measurement and verification protocols for demand-side energy markets showed us how much temporal variability in energy use exists from building to building. However, the amount of carbon emitted to produce that electricity is largely unknown to the end-user. So we wanted to make it possible for any building to account for its carbon emissions using the best possible data."

WattCarbon's platform, to be released in early 2022, creates a granular model of energy use, integrating smart meter or device data where available, and merging it with real-time emissions data from each of the 80 different balancing authorities across the United States and Canada.

One early customer, Aligned Climate Capital, uses WattCarbon's data platform to estimate the carbon impacts of its investments in renewable energy projects. Eric Lee, VP of ESG Investing at Aligned Climate Capital, explains that "prior to WattCarbon, we had to send each project out for a custom analysis, which made it difficult to incorporate into our due diligence. Now we can automate our analysis so that we get estimates of carbon emissions reductions in real-time."

For example, building a new solar farm in California will have less of an impact on carbon emissions than an identical facility in Arizona, due to the reliance on more heavily polluting fossil fuels to power Arizona's grid.

Adds Young, "Anyone trying to improve their carbon emissions must take into account the time of day in which they use or reduce their energy consumption to line up with the availability of renewable energy."

Media Contact

McGee Young, WattCarbon, 1 4147592599, mcgee@wattcarbon.com

SOURCE WattCarbon