Powering the electricity from software use with renewables

[dmiller1727]

Executive Summary

While energy efficiency should always serve as the lead tactic to reduce emissions, it is essential that all remaining energy use is carbon-free. As stakeholders pay increasing attention to Scope 3 emissions, including value chain partners' electricity use, there is an opportunity and need to deploy solutions to reduce Scope 3 emissions and verify these reductions. Startup Zero Labs has developed solutions to help companies address their operational and value chain partners' respective electricity use to reduce their Scope 2 and 3 emissions and accelerate investments in electric grid decarbonization. In this case study, Zero Labs dives into a specific software customer use case to highlight the emergence of new digital solutions that help the digital economy decarbonize in an integrated, automated way.

Description of problem

Too few companies are currently decarbonizing their global operations and value chains. While insufficient regulatory incentives, costs, and competing priorities represent some reasons for slow adoption of climate solutions across the private sector, another reason is that climate action has been too difficult to date. These challenges are amplified further for Scope 3 emissions, such as downstream software use, and by the fact that solution providers do not want to deal with small- or medium-size customers.

How the use case solves the problem

Zero Labs enables programmable decarbonization by helping any company power their operations and value chains with renewables and prove it digitally. We serve as a bulk buyer of renewables and then use web3 technology to show each end user's proportional ownership over the environmental claims from the bulk orders that they can embed in their platforms, apps, communications, and greenhouse gas emission reporting. To date, we have increased global renewable energy demand by over 200,000 megawatt-hours among 2,000+ buyers. For example, we helped Filecoin storage providers provide renewably-powered decentralized cloud storage and radical transparency about the adoption of renewables across the Filecoin network.

You can learn more about this problem and our solution in this blog: https://medium.com/@Zero_Labs/zero-labs-helps-companies-power-their-value-chains-with-renewables-and-prove-it-800cf99f83eb

Main benefits of the solution

The main benefit of Zero Labs' solution is that we can automate the renewable energy procurement and green proof delivery for Scope 3 customer use phase that enables companies to verify that their customers' use of their software on their laptops, mobile devices, tablets, and other devices is verifiably carbon-free and use this evidence to better engage with current and prospective customers. We make it easy for our customers to address their Scope 2 and 3 electricity-based emissions so that they can dedicate more attention to the more challenging parts of their emissions inventory.

What was the outcome, how were carbon emissions reduced

Zero Labs' solution helps companies reduce emissions in their corporate greenhouse gas inventories because every megawatt-hour of electricity consumed by a company that is linked to an energy attribute certificate (EAC) is decarbonized from an accounting perspective. This in turn helps increase renewable energy access for all because the additional revenue and project finance risk reduction generated from EACs helps unlock better, faster finance for adding renewable energy projects to the grid.

Please find an overview about Zero Labs below: ZeroLabs_presentation.pdf

[ursvill]

@dmiller1727 - thanks for sharing! I will look through the case and line up for discussion on the next content call

[seanmcilroy29]

@dmiller1727 - Many thanks for your submission. Can you confirm your company and work email

[dmiller1727]

Hi,

Yes, of course. I’m a cofounder of Zero Labs, a cleantech startup, and my email address is @.***

Please let me know if you have any questions about our submission or if it would be helpful to discuss over a quick call.

-Doug

-Doug

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 12:31 AM Sean Mcilroy @.***> wrote:

@dmiller1727 https://github.com/dmiller1727 - Many thanks for your submission. Can you confirm your company and work email

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/sci/issues/371, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/BBSL5WQCGX43UER2SNUHVPTXWPHUXANCNFSM6AAAAAA26T2WU4 . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: @.***>

-- [image: ZeroLabs.green]

Doug Miller Co-Founder @.*** zerolabs.green

[image: LinkedIn] https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougjmillerjr/ [image: Twitter] https://twitter.com/zerolabsx

[seanmcilroy29]

@dmiller1727 - Thanks, Doug. Before we commit to publishing anything to our website, it needs to be reviewed by the Standards WG first, who'll offer feedback. To speed up the process, I'm going to transfer the Issue.