It’s going to take more than energy-efficient lightbulbs to slow down human-driven climate change. Major shifts in energy consumption will be needed, and Lafayette-based WattCarbon wants to help organizations measure their carbon output and reduce emissions.
WattCarbon monitors a building's energy consumption and compares it to the energy being generated by public utility grids on a 24/7 basis to provide a real-time analysis of emissions.
The startup — co-founded in August by CEO McGee Young, CTO Hassan Shaban and Senior Engineer Keith Weiss — just announced $1.5 million in pre-seed funding. Several angel investors participated in the round with Village Global, Looking Glass, Jetstream, Not-Boring Capital and Keiki Capital.
The company aims to give a more accurate and detailed picture of a company's emissions; emissions are often measured in aggregate but that doesn't take into account the variability of energy consumption. Renewable energy is still largely dependent on the availability of natural resources like solar and wind that are easier to tap into when they're most plentiful.
Renewable energy credits have become a hot commodity over the past few decades as a way for businesses to offset the carbon footprint of their activity. But this process has limits and doesn't further reduce emissions at the source, the WattCarbon team notes.
WattCarbon is designed for people working at "regular organizations that aren't experts that want to do something more meaningful than just buy a carbon offset," said Young, who has a doctorate in political science and taught at Marquette University in Milwaukee. "And to help you make decisions about maybe how to shift when you use energy to be more when it's sunny out or there's more renewables and less when the grid is being powered by fossil fuel power plants."
WattCarbon's product taps into two main sources of data. The first is a building's energy usage from meters or smart devices. The second is publicly available data from balancing authorities which are agencies that monitor supply and demand across regional electrical grids.
In the U.S., there are three main electrical grids with 66 balancing authorities across them. They are divided between the West, the East and Texas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
WattCarbon has five employees and in the near term will be focused on building out its product.
Young, selected for the Milwaukee Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2014, and Shaban previously worked at Recurve as CTO and head of data science, respectively. Recurve is a San Francisco startup that audits homes for energy consumption so they can be retrofitted.
The scale of climate change is so massive that it is causing what some call climate change anxiety. I asked Young if he was a climate optimist or pessimist. He replied, "yes."
"We're gonna experience global warming in a way that I don't think any of us can comprehend at this point," Young said. "The optimistic side of me says that we can choose the future that we want. We can use this as an opportunity to build institutions in a more egalitarian way and make investments that pay off for everybody and not just the uber rich. We can design responses to the challenges of climate change that reflect democratic ideals and move us to a future that may look a lot different ecologically but it doesn't necessarily have to be a dismal existence.”
