Village Carbon is the thesis project presented by Arthur van Havre and Trent Tepool in fulfillment of Harvard University's Master in Design Engineering program requirements. Village Carbon pioneers a new way to subsidize efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of American homes. The project leverages AI and blockchain technology to create a trustable system monetizing the carbon impact of distributed environmental actions. This project was developed under the supervision of Prof. Holly Samuelson (Harvard Graduate School of Design) and Prof. Michael Aziz (Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering).

The platform subsidizes environmental investment by measuring the impact of distributed actions (like installing a heat pump) and selling that impact on the voluntary carbon market. It aims to be a framework deployable for various use cases, including home insulation, distributed energy resources (e.g. solar panels), heating, and transport. The first iteration of Village Carbon focuses on the installation of heat pumps in Northeastern USA. This problem is of particular urgency as home heating contributes to 30% of CO2 emissions in the region, and fossil-based heaters remain the most common systems installed in homes.

Village Carbon measures the carbon impact of heat pump installation over different time horizons using physics-based models developed by NREL. The system deploys those models in conjunction with live data feeds representing weather and grid carbon intensity. The design of the product puts great emphasis on the ideas of additionality and verifiability of results.

The Village Carbon models are deployed as decentralized applications (DAPPs) on the Polygon blockchain. This strategy counts many advantages for the system. It enables a great level of transparency and accountability. The methodology and datasets are public and queryable, enabling easy auditing. Moreover, it paves the way to a better user experience by making sure that homeowners would receive the subsidy at the moment of purchase (rather than over the lifespan of the investment). The use of blockchain and Dynamic NFTs enables the financialization of carbon assets and the efficient management of credits over multiple time scales. Blockchain also enables asset pooling which helps build liquidity in the market and facilitate asset valorization (an important problem within the voluntary carbon market).