Designing The Ultimate Scoreboard
Do you have what it takes to join the Scoreboard Committee for the Race to Zero carbon? #ScoBoComm
Who we are & what we’re looking for in a Scoreboard Committee #ScoBoComm
Hello! I’m the founder of Footprint to Wings, a 501c3 that is turning the Race to Zero Carbon into a national pastime and coaching each state to win. For a quick audio-visual overview, check out our Youtube subscription video.
Home of the First Gigawatt Down metric! #FirstGigawattDown. Join the campaign to adopt this metric! Share with every environmentalists and civilian you know. Politicians, too! Corporations! Everyone. Have an idea how to get to zero carbon? Show us your #FirstGigawattDown!
Check out “First Gigawatt Down” Part I as well, if you feel like it. And note there will be more metrics to come. For example, on the demand side of the field, you’ll need to show us your “first giga-negawatt down”. And other plays, like afforestation or livestock management need different metrics related to land use or biomass or emissions directly. Plus, there are other dimensions of any given play to measure.
We’re rolling out the #FirstGigawattDown metric first because it’s the clearest one to measure. And if we can get folks to wrap their heads around it —just this one thing — it will greatly improve the quality of everyone’s game. Trust me. Watch the video. Folks are playing in the DARK right now.
So we’ve got this Race to Zero Carbon idea, and we’ve got this First Gigawatt Down metric. What we need now is a Scoreboard Committee (#ScoBoComm) to develop, validate, standardize and formalize the ultimate zero carbon scoreboard starting with this metric, and growing forward.
The ultimate ScoBoComm may take a while to form. In the meantime, the proto- ScoBoComm can help to develop an app to get folks started on grasping these ideas. This is a growth — learn as you go- industry.
So right now, we’re looking for a team to develop that user friendly zero carbon scoreboard app using the First Gigawatt Down metric. A simple tool to get everyone on the same page, help everyone truly SEE the challenge, unlock everyone’s potential to maybe even beat climate change — if it can be done.
I say IF, because let’s face it. That’s a big IF, given how incredibly SLOWLY everyone is moving right now. How much time do you think we have? Players! We all need to MOVE like we have a PURPOSE IN LIFE!!!!! ScoBoComm! Step up already!
The Race to Zero Carbon is in progress, whether you realize it or not. Playing out the clock is the LAMEST PLAY OF ALL. Are you on board with our mission to formalize the race into a national pastime? Not just do some token or incremental moves. Getting the whole nation to go ALL THE WAY to zero carbon and beyond? And knowing that many of the players are not that enthused to begin with?
It’s a huge challenge. If we’re going to play this game — we need to hit it HARD — everywhere, everyone. And before you worry about the motivation of all the players, consider this. It’s super hard to motivate people to do something — if you’re ambiguous about what that something IS, and if you’re not clear how long it will take, or how far you have to go.
The Scoreboard is ESSENTIAL in the race to zero carbon. And how it is designed, and what it measures, and how that information is made accessible to people — all of that is important. There’s a lot to measure, a lot to wrap your head around — especially when you consider how much it has to scale. This is why we developed the #ZeroCarbonCoachingClinic — a framework to help everyone wrap their heads around the specifics of the challenge, in a collective fact finding, problem solving and decision making process.
Note that a key part of the clinic, and the race itself — is the scoreboard.
We need a killer scoreboard to help folks focus and win the Race to Zero Carbon. And we need a Dream Scoreboard Team to develop it! (Part of the broader Dream Team to formalize the Race to Zero Carbon.) #ScoBoComm! Report for duty.
In Search of Candidates For The Scoreboard Team!
Do you have what it takes to join the scoreboard team?
How would you design a scoreboard to bring out the best in humanity in this ultimate, life and death Race to Zero Carbon we find ourselves in? If this is something you are thinking about — let’s talk!
Purpose of a Scoreboard
The purpose of the scoreboard is to support the coaches, players and states engaged in the Race to Zero Carbon.
A “personal carbon calculator” does not serve this purpose (well, maybe partially). Ditto the many other types of scoreboards that already exist (a post on that soon. A lot to critique/learn from). We have a specific scoreboard in mind. The ultimate scoreboard to supports effective action in the face of this unprecedented global challenge.
Without a compelling scoreboard, there is no way to win the Race to Zero Carbon. A scoreboard is a platform of accountability. It connects the progress of individuals to the whole. It tracks cumulative impact. It targets information to performance. Every player needs to know the total score and how the other players are doing to know their true position and their best moves.
A compelling scoreboard makes the Race winnable.
Remember, this is an actual, real life, race between states (and countries) to see which one is the first to get to zero carbon.
FYI: Rules of the Race: Fifty US States (countries in the international version) are racing to net zero carbon (and beyond). First state to net zero with the best quality of life WINS! No holds barred. Red state, blue state, wild card solutions are all possible. You’re the player. Your state is your team as a whole. Between you and your whole state are specialized teams (like your household, company, club, community group, etc.). All the plays of all the individuals and specialized teams ADD UP to the final state score.
So…how ‘bout that…
Minimum Viable Scoreboard
Good intentions don’t win points.
We don’t track promises to go to zero. We don’t give points for policies.
We track actual emissions. The first thing the scoreboard needs is a…
Minimum Viable Emissions Check
The first thing you, the player, will want to do in a 50 state race is to see what your state/team’s rank is.
Let’s look at that Zero Carbon Coaching Clinic video again, cued up to the part that we want to turn into the scoreboard app:
As you see, we are ranking the states by “emissions per person.” Other scoreboards look at total emissions. Or they look at policies or specific plays. We don’t. We begin and end with emissions per person. You’ll see why as the game unfolds.
Data for emissions from each state is available from the following sources:
- Tableau Visualization — lets you toggle from state total to per capita emissions;
- Data from the EIA — note the lag time in releasing it. 2 years! How do we get this up to the minute?
Problems with the data: Note the lag time for the EIA data is 2 years. How do we get up to the minute data? Consider how the Electricity Map gets their emissions information in real time. This is what we want for the USA, adapted to our score-keeping system.
User Interaction (mirrors what you see in the video): The user can be asked to guess which state is in the lead in the race to zero carbon. The question takes most people by surprise. The answer even more so. Few people get the answer right.
After the guessing portion, we should design it so the user can see the rankings in table format, and also in the chart format below. And they should be able to hover over the bars and get more information.
Now the user knows the rank and emissions, but they need to know what their state is doing to have such emissions. This brings us to the next part of the app.
State Energy Profile Detail
The user should be able to click on their state and go to their state’s energy profile. The profile should be arranged like a football field. If you were to click on New Jersey, you would get to a bar chart like this (but again, up to date!):
In the video, this section is explained from 4:01 onward. The app should show the decarbonized line, and thus let you know how far you have to go to get to zero carbon (here, we are at the 19 “yard” line, 81% of the field still dominated by fossil fuels.) Note, we should put biomass to the left side of nuclear, as it is still a high carbon emitter.
And there you have it. The minimum viable scoreboard. The beginning of your appreciation of what you have to scale.
Next Steps In the App:
- From the “Energy Supply Field,” the user would be able to click on the different fuel types (i.e., “Natural Gas”) and drill down into what that gas is used for, and what the zero carbon plays would be in connection with that fuel. We would then look for groups or organizations working on that play, (“specialized teams for that play”) and help connect app users to the best ones in their area. #Teamwork!
- For those who are focused on energy supply side plays, the question is, how many power plants of a specific type are needed to replace the fossil fuels. We can thus have a substitution function where we choose which power plant to replace the given section with, and get a sense of the scale for that. This corresponds to 19:35 of the video. Can your power plant take the field?
- As you substitute zero carbon energy, the line of scrimmage moves. If you reduce demand, via efficiency or other means, the size of the field itself is reduced.
- Many more details in mind. We are in the process of working through a user story map and looking for people who want to join the team. Interested? Contact me at Rezwan at fp2w dot org.
The Challenge with Creating the “State Energy Profile” Detail
I find the EIA has not formatted things for easy use. Here’s what I did, a manual process. The data for each state’s energy supply is from eia.gov. I produced the “football field” by going to the state profile print version — here is the page for New Jersey. On that page, you’ll see the bar chart shown below on the left. I hovered over each of those points to get the btus, and then produced the “football field” chart on the right.
There should be an easier way to do this.
In the actual page, you can hover over each bar and see the amount in btus. Where is the dataset for that?
Looking around, I got to this page, and saw “Total End-Use Energy Consumption Estimates by State.” There’s an html file and a pdf file.
Ideally, we would have a real time chart as well as the annual aggregated chart, and the data would be available to support that. We would feed that data in real time and spit out each state’s “energy demand football field.” That would be totally cool!
Ideally, we would order the parts of the field from most carbon intensive to least. Which I’m not sure, but do know coal is the worst. Biomass should actually be on the fossil side before nuclear/electric/renewable. Net interstate also either between biomass and nuclear, or before, as we can’t be sure what is the source of that interstate electricity.
Primary Energy and End Use Energy Delivered
One final note. The EIA data set often expresses the energy in btus (“British Thermal Units”) because they are measuring primary energy. That’s a measure of the heat of a power plant from burning fossil fuels. An irrelevant unit, as far as we’re concerned.
We touch upon the issue in this part of the video.
Check out the APS on energy units. In particular, scroll down to where they discuss “Energy equivalent for non-fossil fuel sources” for a nice intro of the GWyr aka GWe concept.
See also: https://energiogklima.no/kommentar/iea-counts-fossil-fuels-threefold-versus-wind-and-solar/ for some discussion of the problem of measuring heat and not electricity directly.
So! Are you ready to help develop the ultimate scoreboard?
Drop me a line! Rezwan at fp2w dot org
About funding the scoreboard and building up the rest of the organization, check out our call for a dream team here!
To zero carbon and beyond!
PS. There’s really no reason why the data shouldn’t be more up to the minute. Do check out the Electricity Map. A thing of beauty. We likewise want to start connecting the data to states, and even down into counties and smaller levels.
