How our digital team developed a unique carbon accounting tool

James Allan

Senior Director, Quinbrook

Alec Miller

Senior Director, Private Energy Partners

What is Quintrace?

Alec:

Quintrace is a software platform that tracks energy usage and decarbonisation efforts on an hourly basis. It provides detailed information about how much energy was used for a particular load and where that energy came from. This approach helps companies prove they’re meeting their emissions targets. It works on multiple asset types including generation, energy storage, biogas digesters, EV Chargers, and for loads.

Where did the idea for Quintrace come from?

James:

The idea goes back to 2019. Nevada Energy had just signed an offtake agreement with Quinbrook’s Gemini solar and battery project in Las Vegas to supply energy to a major Google data centre.

Google – like other data centre operators, including Microsoft – had recently committed to hourly zero emissions power consumption for all sites. That’s a difficult commitment to make. It relies on having access to bulk renewables and batteries to time-shift the energy. You also need software tools, market institutions and arrangements such as certificate markets, to be able to commercially deliver on that promise.

We realised that if we were going to deliver powered land sites to companies that had committed to using 100% green energy, we needed a system to help them reliably verify the source of the energy.

Scanning the market, we couldn’t see any systems that met those needs. So, we decided to build that system ourselves – and the result is Quintrace.

What problem were you trying to solve?

James:

Even the world’s biggest companies struggle to build all the Solar + Storage they need to serve a data centre – or any major industrial facility – 24/7 without resorting to energy from the grid.

Companies that have committed to zero emissions need to prove they are meeting those targets. If their energy contract fails to deliver in even one hour, they’ve violated their own commitment.

The challenge is that traditional carbon accounting methods that have been used for most of the past two decades look at average outcomes over a long period – often quarterly or annually.

If you look at the energy from a solar plant, using traditional methods, you average the plant’s production over the year, across both day and night. In effect, you’re saying that for a typical day, half the energy comes out during the day, and half comes out at night. That’s not true, of course. No energy comes out of a solar plant at night.

The averaging method also misses the intraday dynamics of the power grid. In places like Australia or California, the carbon intensity of energy from the grid can vary dramatically throughout the day. In the middle of the day, carbon intensity might be low due to solar or wind generation. In the evening, there may be a mix of gas or coal generation, which drives the carbon intensity much higher.

Battery facilities time-shift the power consumption from low-cost, low-carbon times to high-cost, high-carbon times but you need to be able to accurately trace the energy to prove it came from a renewable source.

Without adequate reporting, companies risk being accused of greenwashing, and this can undermine their initiatives.

How is Quintrace more effective than traditional emissions reporting?

Alec:

We developed Quintrace to measure the origin and carbon footprint of energy on an hourly basis – whether that’s from the grid, solar panels or batteries on site, for example. The software uses a complex but practical algorithm to accurately trace energy through storage to the original source, including accounting for losses as the energy goes in and out of the battery. Quintrace is the first software platform to offer this capability, which makes it vastly more effective than traditional emissions approaches which largely ignored energy storage.

This gives a more complete picture of the system than traditional reporting methods and allows companies to accurately track the effect of battery storage on their carbon footprint and energy flows.

How did you approach developing Quintrace and what role did Private Energy Partners plays in that?

James:

Private Energy Partners (PEP) is Quinbrook’s development arm, housing digital efforts including Quintrace.

First, on a shoestring budget, we built a basic version – a minimum viable product (MVP) – of what is now Quintrace. We trialled that system on some Australian assets, and it worked so we made a call to scale it up into an enterprise system, which is what we have today.

Since then, PEP and Quinbrook have collaborated with various portfolio companies to extend Quintrace’s capabilities.

How might Quintrace’s functionality differ between countries like the US, UK/Ireland and Australia?

James:

Overall, the Quintrace platform is the same across regions. The biggest difference is the data inputs it draws.

We use localised data, such as carbon intensity and time scales, from the local energy grids to feed into Quintrace – it’s set up flexibly enough to adapt to different inputs. Quintrace then does standardised calculations on measures such as Scope 2 emissions and how much carbon was avoided by using renewable energy.

For example, when you calculate avoided carbon, you’ll get a higher number in Australia, which has a high carbon grid because there is still a lot of coal power generation, than you would in California, where there’s more solar power.

How do tools like Quintrace help advance the energy transition?

James:

Reliable measurement is an important cog in the wider machine that supports companies to deliver on their net zero commitments.

Companies that want to invest in renewables need to be able to demonstrate the impact of those investments to their stakeholders.

Quintrace helps verify what happened across those energy flows between renewables and batteries and the grid.