Life Cycle Assessments
Life cycle assessments (LCA) have been around for nearly 50 years as a way to measure the impact of products from initial material sourcing to disposal. The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) laid out the foundation in the 1980s with pioneers like Jim Fava. Early frameworks were published including: Eco-indicator 99 for designers, ReCiPe, TRACI, and LIME. EU PEF as a methodology is work in progress. Many tools have since been made available to LCA practitioners, including university-based consortiums. ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 provide LCA guidelines, ISO 14025 for Product Category Rules.
Decision Support Tools
Making human decisions neutral in terms of financial or ethical tradeoffs while meeting energy demands with more sustainable sources requires decision support tools built with this outcome in mind. This will take some time. Supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing systems used today rely on three main decision methods: static rules and heuristics, optimizers, or AI-trained agents. These systems are associated with the nearly 50% ‘making things’ and ‘getting round’ energy needs. Many lessons learned implementing AI-trained decision agents during my time at Pathmind starting in 2018. Much work to be done to incorporate renewables into decisions.
Virtual Power Plants
Virtual Power Plants (VPP) connect individual homes into a central control system that monitors demand and controls supply via controlled devices including home smart thermostats and backup batteries. VPPs aggregate this flexible capacity to address peaks in electricity demand with the goal to replace natural-gas-fired peakers and help address distribution network bottlenecks. Early academic projects around 2018 become commercial applications with some notables: OhmConnect and getting paid to prevent blackouts in California, Tesla Energy VPP, and Evergen in Australia.
Project Drawdown
Project Drawdown applies a sources and sinks framework to better understand how best to rebalance the climate ecosystem. A different lens from the more established supply and demand framework seems needed to change the conversions. Some great learning resources are available along with their 2020 Report that provided my first inspiration.
Super Sankey Graph
In 2017, Otherlab was contracted by the Advanced Research Project Agency of the Department of Energy (ARPA-e) to review all available energy data sources and create an ultra-high resolution picture of the U.S. energy economy. The Otherlab "Super Sankey" tool is available at www.departmentof.energy with downloadable files. Any 1%+ percentage area could represent a $B business opportunity in the making.
Carbon Disclosure Project
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), formed in 2000, is a not-for-profit that runs the global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states and regions to manage their environmental impacts. CDP scoring drives corporate transparency and helps to guide, incentivize and assess environmental action. In 2020, a record-breaking 9,600+ companies disclosed through CDP. Good to see CDP getting Chief Financial Officer sponsors as part of their planning agendas. New accounting, governance, and acronyms being introduced. Perhaps Enterprise Carbon Management software will be a category someday. Great to see companies like Watershed making inroads into corporate planning.