WattTime

WattTime is a nonprofit offering technology solutions that make it easy for anyone to choose clean energy and achieve emissions reductions without compromising cost, comfort, or function. To date, WattTime has directly reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 40 million metric tonnes.

The Problem
Scientists agree that humanity urgently needs to reduce global greenhouse emissions by at least 4 billion tons per year each year from now through 2030 if the world is to have any hope of preventing catastrophic climate change. And yet, year after year, we have failed to do so. Presumably, because most approaches to reduce emissions at such scale with such unprecedented speed are hard: some require hundreds of billions of dollars in capital or even increased costs; some are politically contentious; some require sacrificing comfort or convenience; and some are simply too slow. To generate momentum on climate change, we must quickly reduce at least the first few billion tons by finding rare solutions without these drawbacks.

The Solution
WattTime uses artificial intelligence and extensive emissions and industry data to identify and scale simple, effective environmental solutions. They have identified and are scaling three simple solutions that can collectively reduce global greenhouse emissions by 9 billion tons of CO2 equivalent annually, which is larger than the carbon footprint of the entire United States.
WattTime’s solutions are:
Emissionality: Building solar panels and wind farms in strategic locations can up to triple their impact by helping them replace particularly high-emitting fossil fuel power plants. If fully adopted, this innovation’s impact potential would be 5 billion tons of CO2 per year.
Automated Emissions Reduction: Setting smart devices like smart thermostats, mobile phones, electric vehicles, and batteries to intelligently charge at optimal times instead of random times can reduce 3 billion tons of CO2 per year.
Supply Chain Optimization: Updating procurement practices to fully use the output of the world’s cleanest steel and aluminum factories before turning to higher-emitting factories can save 1 billion tons of CO2 per year. When including other industries, the total potential is likely even larger.

WattTime’s work focuses on identifying and rapidly scaling these new techniques. By focusing on no-regrets techniques that work at scale, they are able to grow quickly. For example, WattTime’s Automated Emissions Reduction (AER) technique alone reached the milestone of 1 billion daily active users in the summer of 2024, and its other innovations are used by companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, Honda, BMW, and Toyota.

To accelerate these innovations, WattTime coordinates the Climate TRACE coalition, a collaboration of over 100 nonprofits, universities, and tech companies that use artificial intelligence and remote sensing to monitor global emissions. Today, Climate TRACE is monitoring the emissions from over 352 million facilities worldwide and closing in on a complete facility-level view of all sources of global climate change. Armed with this data, WattTime supports numerous partner nonprofits within the coalition to identify and scale faster, cheaper, easier, and more politically palatable methods to reduce emissions.