About the OpenEAC Alliance
The OpenEAC Alliance is a group of industry professionals and organizations formed to ensure quality, consistency and transparency in distributed energy resource (DERs) measurement and verification.
First, what is an EAC?
An EAC is an Energy Attribute Certificate, which represents a unique claim to the environmental benefits of decarbonization projects. EACs are granular instruments assigned to a watt hour of energy or a gram of CO2 that specify all attributes of a project, including resource type, production time, precise location, local grid carbon emissions intensity, resource operation start date, and whether it is a Scope 1, 2, or 3 emission. Think of it as a full nutritional label for the energy involved with carbon reduction projects. With an EAC you can always know exactly where, when, and how the energy was created or saved. It also gives a full auditable history of the carbon or energy savings from a particular product.
Read more about EACs
What is the goal of the alliance?
The OpenEAC Alliance aims to enhance oversight and quality in clean energy measurement and verification, and to solve for structural barriers that have prevented the climate benefits of DERs from being properly valued. Instead of having unclear or nebulous savings of carbon, the goal is to have something clear, measurable, and auditable.
Together, we can do that by creating transparent & consistent industry standards around how we measure and report on DERs.
Why?
Professional opinions and methods vary on the best way to calculate energy savings from DERs (Distributed Energy Resources). That is inadvertently hindering our ability to maximize their impact. Corporate Capital doesn’t want to invest in decarbonization projects when no one can agree how the best way to measure the effectiveness of the project.
By creating industry-wide consistency & transparency in DER measurement & verification, we can enable DERs to be valued for their significant carbon impacts and supercharged through energy markets.
How it works
The OpenEAC Alliance is a volunteer body that will provide oversight for the methodologies that are adopted to generate EACs registered on WEATS. The Alliance will draw participants from around the globe who share an interest in ensuring that all EACs that are transacted accurately reflect the carbon emissions impacts of the underlying energy embodied by the EAC.
The Alliance will create an open source methodological framework for certifying EACs that relies on community standards and builds on existing best practices. This approach requires a commitment to transparency and openness, but can deliver considerable cost reductions while incentivizing the development of more robust methodologies.
Who should join?
We are an open, global network of experts collaboratively strengthening energy attribute certificate (EACs) standards and creating industry-wide consistency. This is for clean energy M&V folks around the globe who share an interest in ensuring that all EACs are transacted accurately.
