WattTime

WattTime is funded primarily by charitable contributions from nonprofits and for-profit businesses. ^{2 3}

History

WattTime  was founded in 2014 by a group of University of California, Berkeley researchers in the fields of behavioral economics, software programming, and data science, including executive director Gavin McCormick, who dropped out of his doctoral program at UC Berkeley to start the organization. ^{1 4 5}

Activities

WattTime is best known for developing Automated Emissions Reduction technology, a system that tracks emissions data from power grids to determine the relative levels of energy sources used throughout the day. WattTime claims that charging an electric car battery in the United States produces about 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year on average, but with use of AER, emissions would fall to 0.7 tons of carbon dioxide annually. By 2024, over one billion individuals had used AER technology in some form. ^{6 5 7}

WattTime’s AER technology has been used by government agencies. For instance, the State of California implemented AER in the Public Utility Commission’s Self-Generation Incentive Program to target lower state-wide emissions. ⁵

WattTime has compensated several left-of-center nonprofits and universities for contracting work. In 2024, this included the Rocky Mountain Institute, Global Energy Monitor, CTrees, Michigan State University, and Global Fishing Watch. ⁸

In 2019, WattTime and Google’s AI Impact Challenge co-founded Climate TRACE, a program that detects emissions from power plants through monitoring from satellites. The program presented its findings in 2023 at the United Nations’s COP28. ⁵

Additionality Policies

In discussions on combating climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, WattTime supports “additionality policies” over “emissionality” policies. The former encourages the replacement of existing energy systems with lower-emissions energy production, like weather-dependent energy; the latter supports an emphasis on building more low-emissions energy production on top of existing higher-emissions systems. For instance, WattTime argues that it would be more efficient to fight climate change by building new weather-dependent energy systems in regions that rely primarily on traditional energy sources and then use AER technology to optimize emissions, than to retrofit existing fuel-energy regions into weather-dependent energy production. ³

In January 2026, WattTime submitted a formal complaint to GHG Protocol, the most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standard. WattTime criticized the protocol for failing to implement an “additionality” requirement in its framework for fighting climate change and failing to encourage entities devoted to fighting climate change to add more low-emissions systems to their operations rather than just scaling back so-called greenhouse gas production in current systems. WattTime claimed that the GHG Protocol’s updates could increase “greenhouse gas” emissions rather than reduce them. ⁹

Partners

Numerous for-profit companies, nonprofits, and universities have partnered with WattTime to implement AER technology into their operations. WattTime’s for-profit corporate partners include Edison Energy, Phoenix Energy Technologies, Toyota, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce. ¹⁰

WattTime’s university partners include Boston University, the Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute, the University of Michigan’s Campus Farm and Michigan Power & Energy Laboratory, Princeton University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences. ^{10 3}

WattTime’s nonprofit partners include the Edwards Mother Earth Foundation, the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, and the Rocky Mountain Institute. ¹⁰

Funding

WattTime is structured as a charitable nonprofit and generates most of its income from charitable contributions. In 2024, the group earned $21,292,468 in revenues, with $18,544,604 coming from contributions and $2,667,271 coming from program services. ⁸

WattTime has received funding from former Vice President Al Gore (D), LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the Clean Air Fund, the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Echoing Green, the Edwards Mother Earth Foundation, the Generation Foundation, Partners of Generation Investment Management, the Great Lakes Protection Fund, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Holdfast Collective, the HPE Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Google, Meta, Salesforce, and Amazon. In 2024, WattTime executive director Gavin McCormick described Google as “by far our largest funder.” ^{2 3}