This Minimum Viable Product will demonstrate these key concepts from the Multi Channel Data Architecture and Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group:
- Use Hyperledger to perform a carbon accounting audit or carbon neutrality certification in a permissioned ledger.
- Create tokens or assets based on the audit so that it could be used for another company, such as a customer, in its carbon audit and certification down the value chain.
It's a simulation of how carbon emissions data could be shared across multiple permissioned ledgers once this technology becomes widely adopted. Meanwhile, it could also be used as a self-contained application for calculate carbon emissions of companies.
Let's start with a hypothetical company C1, which makes and sells a product. To do so, it purchases energy from a local utility and raw materials from a supplier. To become carbon neutral, it purchases a Renewable Energy Certificates (REC's) to offset its energy emissions and carbon offsets to balance out its overall carbon footprint.
Each of the entities will tokenize the carbon footprint of its output and place it on a permissioned ledger for its customers to use:
- The utility will create a token of its carbon emissions based on kWH sold and place it on the utility permissioned ledger. (In reality, this will probably have to be done by an entity which does this for the utility.)
- The REC and carbon offsets sellers will each publish a token of the amount of renewable energy or carbon offsets purchased and place them on their respective ledgers. These could be ledgers shared by multiple REC and carbon offsets sellers and all their customers.
- Finally, the raw materials supplier will create a token for its product and place it on its own permissioned ledger.
The MVP would:
- Subscribe to the permissioned ledgers of the utility, REC seller, carbon offsets seller, and raw materials supplier.
- Obtain the tokens from the utility, REC seller, carbon offsets seller, and raw materials supplier.
- Obtain information about the company's output.
- Run smart contract to calculate the net emissions of the company.
- Calculate the carbon emissions per unit of product sold.
- Set up a permissioned ledger for the company's customers.
- Create tokens or assets on the ledger for the company's products.
...
- Access data from several permissioned channels.
- Use standard model-factors to calculate emissions from the data.
- Record the emissions results on its own permissioned channel for the next entity to consume.
The MVP will allow self-contained carbon emissions calculators for different purposes, as well as simulate how carbon emissions data could be shared across a supply chain with multiple parties.
The MVP will be designed to run as a serverless micro service, so that it could be run on Amazon Lambda or Cloud Functions from Google or IBM.
Potential data sources include:
- Utility bills
- Shipping data
- Travel data
- Vehicle trip data
- Renewable Energy Certificates
- Carbon offsets
See the Data Center Carbon Calculator for a very simple example of this.