Watershed and Powertrust are announcing a first-of-its-kind partnership to help companies meet their climate commitments by addressing electricity emissions in Asia, the world’s most emissive region.
To reduce their scope 2 and 3 emissions, most companies will need their business facilities and supply chains to be powered by electricity from renewable energy sources. However, many companies lack access to high-quality renewable energy projects, particularly in emerging markets where the renewables industry is still developing.
The Watershed and Powertrust partnership addresses this challenge by sourcing high-impact distributed renewable energy (DRE) projects in emerging markets across Asia for purchase by Watershed customers.
Through the partnership, Watershed customers will contribute to mobilizing finance for projects that are electrifying schools, hospitals, healthcare centers, SMEs, and remote communities. The solution supports solar developers with multi-year renewable energy procurement contracts backed by corporate purchase agreements, all facilitated through the Powertrust technology platform which manages end-to-end electricity data acquisition and certification.
There are several advantages to the Watershed and Powertrust approach:
- Agility: DREs are well-suited to emerging markets. They are quick to build, don’t need significant amounts of funding, and are easily connected to the power grid. This makes them more flexible to deploy than the large-scale renewable projects that companies typically rely on in markets like North America and Europe.
- Additionality: This innovative financial and project monitoring structure allows customers to bring new clean power projects onto the grid, rather than sourcing renewable energy credits (RECs) from operational clean power projects, which has significantly less environmental benefit.
- Impact: Select Watershed and Powertrust projects also support other United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For example, a network of solar projects in Uttar Pradesh powers micro, small, and medium enterprises, with each 10–100 kW solar project powering village industries like sewing, grain processing, milk chilling, and rice hulling.
- Transparency: Powertrust and Watershed provide an end-to-end auditable process from meter data through reporting with near-real-time granular visibility.
“Our customers have global operations and supply chains, and it is clear that they need high-impact solutions outside of North America and Europe to meet their ambitious climate targets. But most companies struggle to source quality projects outside their home markets,” said Matt Konieczny, Watershed’s head of clean power. “Through our partnership with Powertrust, our customers now have access to high-impact, highly additional clean power from vetted suppliers—projects that will help customers make progress on their climate goals while contributing to the energy transition in priority markets.”
“Watershed and Powertrust both use a data-driven approach to ensure complete transparency and demonstrated impact. This provides a seamless solution for everyone: from the customers meeting their climate commitments, to the renewable energy developers that need capital,” said Powertrust co-founder Nick Fedorkiw. “Distributed renewables may be small, but aggregated at scale they make a powerful contribution to addressing both our climate targets and universal Sustainable Development Goals.”
Powertrust and Watershed are offering Watershed customers access to an extensive network of DRE project developers across a growing list of countries, including nearly a dozen in Asia. Electric grids in countries such as India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia still run on highly emissive fossil fuels like coal. India and Indonesia’s electricity generation is 70% and 55% coal respectively, compared to 20% in the United States, making emissions from electricity in emerging markets one of the major hurdles in the fight against climate change. The problem is growing quickly as electricity demand in Asia is forecast to grow 33% by 2030, compared to 7% growth in the United States over the same period.
If you are interested in procuring renewable energy in emerging markets or are a solar developer, reach out to Beatrice Kennedy at hello@powertrust.com or Matt Konieczny at marketplace@watershed.com.
