A new carbon and energy tracking platform is offering developers, fleet owners and clean energy owner-operators a real-time glance at the emissions impact of their assets.
Climate data and analytics company WattCarbon announced the launch of its new AI-powered carbon measurement and verification platform, Aristotle.
Designed to help users measure the return-on-investment of clean energy projects in financial and environmental terms, the platform integrates smoothly with smart energy meters, sensors and datasets to provide granular data about how assets are performing.
“Decarbonization makes sense financially,” WattCarbon CEO McGee Young told pv magazine USA. “But as a business, you need proof that it’s delivering more revenue.”
Without data around asset performance, companies can’t be certain that they’re getting their money’s worth.
That’s where Aristotle comes in, Young said, as the real-time insights coupled with AI-generated reference models enables users to see what is and isn’t working.
“Imagine you’re helping a homeowner think through all the complexity of putting in solar and storage,” said Andrew Krause, the CEO of California-based solar contractor Northern Pacific Power, in a conversation with pv magazine USA. “Homeowners want to know: How can I trust your electricity usage models if you’re incentivized to sell me your systems? That’s where third-party measurement and verification comes in. It shows that your systems do what they say they’re going to do.”
Another major use case lies in the battery sphere.
Young said that Aristotle records every watt-hour that enters and exits a battery and its source. That data is then translated into an emissions profile for the asset that’s based on grid carbon intensity at the time of dispatch. He noted that time-based accounting could enable a new way for commercial users (like data centers or fleet EV charging hubs) to meet their clean energy or corporate sustainability goals.
“When you go to the gas station, you can get the 87, the 89, or the 91,” he said, adding that you have the option to pay a little extra per gallon to get the higher-quality gasoline. EV charging stations could use the same idea to offer a clean energy charging option, where users could pay an extra five cents per kWh. “If it’s part of a commercial fleet, the cleaner the energy that goes into your vehicles, the lower your emissions profile is.”
“There’s a lot of room for innovation in the space,” he added, “As we have better, more granular data to describe exactly the value of the energy that’s being delivered.”
Still, what excites Young most is Aristotle’s plug-and-play integration with data providers like Arcadia, UtilityAPI and Bayou Energy.
“You can drop in your API key and within ten minutes have savings calculations for any of your assets at your fingertips,” he said.
Krause echoed Young’s sentiment, noting that a data infrastructure like WattCarbon’s has been “extremely cost-prohibitive” in the past.
“It has always taken weeks, if not months, for somebody to pull the data together; to make that basically seamless is a gamechanger for the industry,” said Young. “We’re really excited to see folks start to play with it and to understand the use cases that will come out of having that [data] immediately at their disposal.”
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