Carbon-Free Chronicles: the essential roundup of news ans reports relating to 24/7 clean energy - April 2024

We constantly see more content, education, reports, news and announcements shared on the topic of certificate management, 24/7 carbon-free energy and clean energy sourcing. Here we highlight the best news and reports alongside our own regular insight articles from April 2024.

What we’re reading

The Guarantees of Origin market: a common minimum for further clean energy reporting

• Joni Vuorela from Fortum shares thoughts on his decade of work in the GO market and highlights their role and importance: without GOs, we can’t distinguish between a grey and green transition.
• As the market matures, faces volatility and scrutiny, he emphasises their foundational purpose as ‘guardians of renewable energy authenticity’.
• As regulation evolves, Vuorela sees GOs as a base for clean energy reporting, which shouldn’t stop market participants from going beyond: for a more accurate correlation of GOs to consumption, he suggests implementing hourly matching with additional information as a solution.

Spatio-temporal load shifting allows truly clean computing

• The TU Berlin energy modelling team lead by Tom Brown look at the impact of shifting computing jobs in time and space, between datacenter locations.
• The conclusion? Energy procurement and load-shifting facilitate the resource-efficiency and cost-effectiveness of clean computing.
• The costs of 24/7 CFE is reduced for every additional percentage of flexible load.
• The paper explains the assumptions, model, and practical guidelines on how companies with datacenters can leverage spatio-temporal load flexibility for truly clean computing.

With better energy data access, a faster clean energy transition

• The Google energy team published a new paper emphasizing the importance of energy data access and standardization to enable the clean energy transition.
• Access to transparent, high quality, standardised, timestamped energy data will enable more accurate carbon footprint measurement and accelerate electricity systems decarbonisation.
• Google calls for access to information on energy consumption, power system mix, and energy attribute certificates to back corporate procurement claims.
• Google lists the progress needed on the data transparency front: A regulatory push for standardized data access and tracking requirements Registry software modernization to support hourly tracking Utility software modernisation to support hourly matching of generation to consumption

What we’re writing

When should companies be able to claim they consume carbon-free electricity?

• Alongside The NorthBridge Group and the Clean Air Task Force , we published a white paper and hosted a webinar about modernising scope 2 accounting standards.
• We cover the shortcomings of current standards, particularly the GHG Protocol’s failure to accurately measure electricity-related emissions, its disregard for firm carbon-free electricity (CFE) and balancing resources (e.g., storage), and the overall lack of prioritization of emission-reduction actions.
• We propose 5 key principles for emissions accounting: location-matching, time-matching, CFE equality, EAC ownership and allocation, EAC integrity
• Applying these five principles can unlock billions of dollars annually of targeted investment for the technologies most needed to decarbonize our energy system.
• Download the paper and watch the highlights webinar featuring Neil Fisher , Armond Cohen and Toby Ferenczi

Hourly Matching for Newbies

• New to the industry, new to hourly matching, granular certificates? We’ve got you covered with an article introducing key concepts and industry must knows.
• Current carbon accounting requires annual matching, a methodology that leads to distrust and ineffective price signals: an energy consumer can ‘match’ its electricity usage in periods of low renewables (windless nights) with periods when renewables are in excess supply (a windy sunny summers day).
• Hourly matching requires an energy consumer (or their energy supplier) to match consumption with clean energy production on an hourly or sub-hourly basis instead of annually. Some of the system level impacts include: Deployment of more clean energy capacity to meet volumes of matched consumption Investment in dispatchable technology that can output carbon-free energy at any time (think storage) Development of demand response or load flexibility (see above).
• Achieving 100% hourly matching is costly today: most Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) is produced by non-dispatchable wind and solar assets. However analysis and research shows that a high level of matching (90-95%) can be achieved at a small premium and still provides a significant reduction in emissions in comparison to annual matching.