Climate change is at the forefront of everyone's mind. But what does it really entail, and how can the average person do anything to help substantially? Dr. Sunny Sanwar has created an AI-based platform, called Dynamhex, which allows individuals and businesses to measure their emissions and learn ways to efficiently mitigate their impact on the environment.

What is Dynamhex?

Dynamhex is a community-centric, digital platform for climate action. It helps individuals and businesses quickly understand their personalized carbon footprints across scope 1, 2 and 3, and learn steps to achieve decarbonization in lock-step with their community. The Web-based application accesses services from local power providers while collaborating with community members to empower everyone with the knowledge and ability to solve climate change together, building by building, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Your carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, generated by your actions, like home energy and driving. Dynamhex's bottom-up model statistically estimates all uses of energy and resources that collectively make up greenhouse gas emissions, such as liquid fuel use in transportation, electricity and fuel use in homes, offices and other structures, as well as information from power providers on the types of fuels they consume to generate electricity.

Most residents are not completely aware of their overall carbon footprint or know the personalized avenues available to make measurable changes in consumption or costs. The community's use of Dynamhex helps each resident understand their own footprint and what they can do to reduce their footprint, such as insulate a crawl space, find rebates for efficient appliances, or lighting and more.

Dynamhex shows each building owner and resident through tangible steps what they can do and use to reduce their carbon footprint or environmental impact. The tool measures carbon emissions given off from their energy use (electricity, natural gas, other fuels used in buildings or gasoline from transportation) by identifying sources of energy waste, such as poor insulation or old equipment, allowing residents to lower their bills while lowering emissions.

At the community level, the city uses the information gathered by Dynamhex to inform its long-term strategy to build a healthy community — including urban planning, development and purchasing decisions. By knowing the distribution of emissions across the city, the city can better set emission targets. These targets will influence policy-making and program development in ways that can reduce emissions over time. The data-centric tool enables the city staff and leadership to identify community partners who can join them in addressing concerns of energy costs, environmental pollution and community health.

The new climate targets call for the US and her citizens to collectively reduce their emissions by 40 per cent by 2030. Dynamhex assists cities, residents, and local businesses by keeping track of their footprint and helping them contribute to that goal. By using Dynamhex, your community is leading by example and taking a data-backed and collaborative approach to measure emissions, set targets and unlock climate action and emissions reduction.

Increasingly, such emission reduction plans are becoming vitally important for multiple levels. At the national level, US federal legislation provides $250 million for states to develop plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA will also have a total of $5.75 billion to competitively award grants to any eligible entities to implement their plans to reduce emissions. "To secure funding from the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, plans need to include programs, policies, measures, and projects that will reduce greenhouse gas pollution, how much will be reduced, and how it will be measured."
Data technologies and automation not only show the measurement protocol, but where impactful projects and programs may come from.

Beyond the federal level, corporations also have a key role. The upcoming rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would require public issuers to disclose material climate risks, greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, and emissions reduction targets and transition plans.

A very large number of building stakeholders, particularly commercial tenants, real-estate lenders, and investors are public entities and would be covered by the SEC rule. As a result, millions of buildings would have to quickly figure out a way to measure, and make disclosures about their real-estate holdings in the format and framework stipulated.

Real estate accounts for a significant component of GHG emissions in almost all industries. As a result, meeting the SEC's reporting requirements is only possible when understanding the emissions that come from real-estate footprints. Which is where Dynamhex seeks to provide value by automating measures and reporting.

Dynamhex Data

Each year, the demographic and socio-economic make up of a city change drastically, with more buildings being built or renovated, and economic activity changing. As a result, the drivers of greenhouse gas emissions change significantly each year. These new data sets are recompiled and re-analyzed to arrive at different measured emissions results on an annual basis, which includes new building stock, changed power plant configurations and transportation patterns.

To account for major building updates and changes, Dynamhex scans aerial data, public and private databases for building-level upgrades such as permits to analyze county-level changes and estimate the dates they were made. Tenants and property owners can also update the platform with the latest changes, and the application will auto-calibrate as utility use changes.

Dynamhex uses various public sources of data to identify the pertinent parameters of each building, like city or county records. The company does not share personal information with any third-party sources.

Reducing Your Carbon Footprint and Saving Energy

Beyond replacing structures or equipment, like insulation upgrades, replacing old appliances, various behavioral measures such as energy conservation, including turning off lights when not in use, using timers and smart thermostats to regulate heating and cooling and more, can save lots of energy and money. These same activities also directly reduce each resident's footprint and lower their environmental impact.

Dynamhex also calculates your percentage electrification, denoting the portion of electricity-based energy used by each resident. In other words, a building with 67 per cent electrification means that two-thirds of all energy consumed by the structure in any given year is electricity, and one-third is some form of liquid or gaseous fuel. The higher the electrification percentage, the more efficient and clean the energy source is, depending on the building's local grid. Direct fuels should be converted into electricity usage, such as using electric heat pumps for buildings or electric vehicles for transportation. Most of these upgrades are part of the IRA bill passed last month by the federal government to help each household pay for these.