Guest: Daniel Roesler (LinkedIn)
Organization/Company: LF Energy (Twitter) | UtilityAPI (Twitter)

For companies wanting to assess customers’ utility usage data, it can be a key challenge that an open specification around carbon accounting has not been created yet. Utility data has not historically had a standard format, which can take time and energy to calculate into a uniform standard.

In this episode of State of Energy, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Daniel Roesler, Working Group 1 (WG1) maintainer at LF Energy and CTO at UtilityAPI, to discuss the Customer Data Working Group at LF Energy and how it is helping organizations better understand customer’s utility usage data and the key focus of the working group at LF Energy.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• The Customer Data Working Group at LF Energy focuses on specifying a streamlined process for requesting and obtaining customer utility usage data. Roesler tells us what is involved for companies calculating the carbon impact of a customer’s utility usage data.
• The Carbon Data Specification is an initiative by LF Energy that aims to have an open set of specifications and procedures to further accelerate the calculation of carbon intensity for various customers. Roesler explains the concept of carbon accounting and how the carbon data specification can be used, such as ascertaining the grid information for how carbon-intensive the grid is.
• Roesler explains that up to now, there has not been a set of open specifications around carbon accounting, He discusses why LF Energy has been working to create a set of open specifications that anybody can use and work with, to improve practices around Scope 2 and sScope 3 emissions reporting.
• Roesler details how UtilityAPI came to be involved in the project, telling us that they focus on providing authorization-driven customer data access in the US and Canada. He talks about their contribution to the program.
• Key participants in the development of these specifications include big players like Google and Microsoft who are interested in facilitating carbon accounting growth in the marketplace. Roesler talks about the two tech giant’s initiatives and how they are helping with moving toward carbon-free initiatives.
• While many companies are trying to account for their carbon emissions, it is often a case of one solution does not fit all. Roesler discusses the significant impact different factors have on transitioning away from fossil-based generation toward clean energy sources and what this initiative involves.
• Roesler explains UtilityAPI’s creation and the initial problem they were trying to solve. Key challenges they encountered with trying to pull their utility data to measure how much an organization was using to calculate the financial feasibility of a solar project or an energy efficiency project include different data formats and why there needs to be a standardized specification.
• Roesler describes some of the use cases the working group has encountered such as   carbon accounting, calculating carbon footprint, deployment of clean energy technologies in a more streamlined fashion, and distributed energy resources.
• UtilityAPI and LF Energy are looking for anyone involved in Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions and anyone interested in deploying solutions to get involved.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.