Alternative Energy White Papers

Danfoss is kicking off COP27 by highlighting the urgent action to address the growing demand for energy. Danfoss President & CEO Kim Fausing says the build-out of renewables will not be even near sufficient if we don’t curb our demand for energy. A new white paper from Danfoss highlights the dramatic increase in global demand for energy and argues that, without urgent action to curb energy demand, the build-out of renewables will be insufficient to meet the needs of a growing population.

In WattTime’s Accounting for Impact report, we explore the GHGP’s current methods for measuring Scope 2 emissions and propose a new methodology to better align traditional GHG accounting with science-based decision-making tools. Our proposed solution focuses on measuring actual induced emissions caused by electricity consumption and the avoided emissions impact of renewable energy generation using marginal emissions rates. This approach can more effectively and consistently capture what GHG accounting ultimately should be about: measuring progress toward system-wide emissions reductions. By refocusing GHGP’s Scope 2 methodology toward this goal using impact accounting, corporate and institutional sustainability leaders can arrive at higher-impact choices and investments that help them reach a true state of ‘impact neutral’.

An “8760” (sometimes known as a “typical meteorological year,” or “TMY”) is a year-long hourly time series of expected generation for a wind or solar project. As the name implies, an 8760 contains generation values for all 8,760 hours of a year (non-leap year) and captures the typical seasonal and diurnal generation patterns at the site. Despite their widespread use in the renewable energy industry, there are two particular use cases of 8760s that can lead to significant errors in revenue estimation: 1) the pairing of an 8760 with a non-concurrent price time series and 2) the use of an 8760 as an input to a forward-looking price model.