How Atmos Calculates Carbon Impact
Atmos Financial always aims to maximize positive environmental impact. Part of achieving our mission is to share with you, our account holders, how we’re deploying your deposits. Let’s jump right to it:
Updated June 14th 2024
Here’s how we calculate your impact:
0.312 lbs CO2 avoided / $ of deposits / year
This means if your account holds $10,000 today, you’re avoiding 3,120 lbs or roughly 1.6 tons of C02 from ever entering the atmosphere every year. Or 8.548lbs of C02 entering the atmosphere every day!
That’s like avoiding driving 10 miles in an average gasoline powered car every day. Or charging your phone from a clean energy source 256 times each day. Just from keeping your money in an Atmos Financial account!
The calculations for climate nerds...like you and me
How’d we get that 0.312 lbs CO2 avoided per dollar per year metric? Like this:
- The weighted average grid emissions per kWh* is 0.66 lbs CO2/kWh, in the 11 states we’re currently active in.
- Multiply that by our current solar portfolio of 11,868kW.
- Multiplied by 1,564 kWh/kW-year — each kW of solar makes this much energy per year on average. This is the weighted average estimate based on our 2023 portfolio.
- = 6,125 tons CO2 total emissions per year of grid emissions avoided.
- => your dollar deposited per year helps avoid a tiny piece of that every year, around 0.312 lbs CO2.
C = 0.312 / 365 = 0.0008548 CO2 avoided per dollar per day (our daily carbon-dollar coefficient)
Daily Impact (CO2 avoided) = Daily Active Balance (USD) C (lbs CO2)
Cumulative = Sum [Daily Impact (T0 - Ti)] / 2000 tons CO2
*kWh stands for kilowatt-hour, a unit of energy that measures how much energy a device or system uses over a period of one hour.
For Day One Atmos account holders
If you’ve logged into your Atmos account recently, you may have noticed the above updated Carbon Impact Number that we've applied to your daily deposits. Your account impact data has been modified to reflect the change in our funding model!
Don’t worry, Atmos still assumes a deposit ratio of 80%, meaning that we can deploy up to 80% of our deposits at any one time.
Our team has been hard at work refining our systems to ensure accuracy and transparency in how we measure the impact of your accounts. By providing more accurate data, we aim to empower you with a clearer understanding of the true impact of your financial decisions.
What’s the reason for this change?
1. Grid emissions: In the last year, Atmos made the decision to switch from funding utility scale solar to residential solar. The utility-scale projects Atmos funded were mostly in the South and Southwest region of the United States, which often have dirtier grids** than the US average (0.81 lbs CO2/kWh). We launched residential in areas where solar is booming, but happened to have a blend of hydro and coal grids for cleaner results.
Note: Our first 7 states for residential solar had an average of 0.66 lbs CO2/kWh, and now the 11 states where we fund solar projects have an average of 0.53 lbs CO2/kWh. As we expand westward this average will continue to increase towards the national average.
Source: Energy Information Administration
**A dirty grid, also known as dirty power, is a power grid that has been affected by abnormalities such as power surges, excessive line noise, and fluctuating frequency.
2. Solar production: Since the majority of Atmos utility-scale projects were situated in the South and Southwest (where it’s sunnier), the annual solar energy production estimates were significantly higher than many of our introductory residential solar projects in other states.
Source: NREL, AVERT
3. Installation price: In switching our funding from utility-scale solar at $1/W to our residential solar portfolio at $3.29/W, we can now fund fewer projects per dollar.
What our numbers don’t take into account, is the benefit of financing projects at the point of electricity consumption and avoiding the transmission and distribution needs of utility-scale projects. Source: Internal Atmos pricing data
As we expand and evolve our impact portfolio, we’ll be sure to continue updating you on the projects your deposits are funding— as always, you’ll be able to take a closer look our progress by visiting our impact page.
Why residential solar?
We made the pivotal move from funding utility scale solar to residential solar in order to provide much-needed savings for homeowners vs the high-cost incumbents.
What goes into calculating our carbon impact number?
Energy Production (E) : The Energy Production, measured in kWh is an estimate of the output from the solar PV systems installed at the borrower’s building.
E (kWh/yr) = NREL solar energy production estimate (kWh/kW-yr) * system size (kW)
Carbon Emissions Avoided (C) : For our updated Atmos Impact Calculation, we are using state-level emissions data from the US Energy Information Administration. In later versions, we will use plant-level data local to the borrower to get the most accurate picture of their avoided emissions.
C (lbs CO2/yr) = EIA emissions intensity (lbs CO2/kWh) * energy produced (kWh/yr)
The Future of Atmos Impact
With the expansion of our financial initiatives to include small-business solar + storage, Atmos Financial is excited to soon incorporate residential and small business heat pumps into our portfolio.
This development marks a pivotal step forward in our commitment to supporting sustainable energy solutions. With these new distributed assets, our portfolio emissions will naturally evolve, reflecting a broader and more diverse range of impactful investments.
Our forthcoming update, V2.2, will integrate these additions seamlessly, ensuring that our calculations accurately capture the collective impact of Atmos customers' contributions to the renewable energy landscape.
We're eager to continue this impact journey with you, powering a swift global transition to a clean and fair economy.
Stay tuned for further updates.
This update builds upon the foundation laid by V1.0, which focused on estimating the impact of financing utility-scale solar projects.