This story is part of ClimateTechReview Climate Tech 100 series, which will feature 100 global companies helping address climate change by innovating in the fields of renewable energy, electric mobility, energy storage, energy efficiency, CCUS and climate finance. If you have a story to share, email us at hello@climatetechreview.com.
Granular Certificates (GCs) have emerged as a groundbreaking solution to revolutionize clean energy markets by providing real-time verification of the source of electricity and carbon emissions.
Unlike traditional energy certificates, which offer limited information on energy production, GCs record the precise hour of energy generation, enabling consumers to identify abundance and shortage periods with exceptional precision.
This level of granularity delivers a sharp price signal for clean energy availability, a crucial factor for consumers seeking to make informed choices and contribute to a sustainable future.
Integrating a higher share of renewable energy into the grid presents numerous challenges, including fast permitting, grid capacity expansion, and system flexibility.
Traditional energy markets often struggle to address these issues adequately.
However, GCs, with their hourly energy accounting, offer a transformative solution.
By capturing the time of production, GCs drive demand for storage and flexibility technologies, create new value signals, and provide accurate carbon accounting.
This approach empowers consumers with transparency about the true provenance of their energy and fosters the development of clean energy markets aligned with the goals of deep grid decarbonization.
In this episode of Climate Tech 100, we are excited to be joined by Killian Daly from EnergyTag, an independent, non-profit, industry-led initiative to define and build a market for Granular Certificates.
Can you explain how Granular Certificates provide real-time verification of the source of electricity and carbon emissions? How does this differ from traditional energy certificates?
Granular certificates (GCs) record the hour in which energy was produced, traditional energy certificates (i.e RECs) usually only tell us the day or month of energy production making them unsuitable for “real-time” verification.
GCs provide us with a razor sharp price signal for clean energy availability, helping consumers identify times of abundance and shortage in a way that today’s clean energy markets cannot.
What are the challenges that arise when integrating a higher share of renewable energy into the grid, and how do hourly energy certificates address these challenges?
Integrating high levels of renewables needs a number of things to go right e.g fast permitting, grid capacity expansion, renewable production build out and of course system flexibility and storage to manage renewable intermittency.
Today’s clean energy market don’t properly tackle these problems.
Taking storage for example, its critical value is shifting clean power from times of abundance to times of shortage, GCs can help drive demand for storage by creating value signals to transfer clean power to times of shortage.
Traditional certificates don’t tell us the time of production and so cannot, by design, properly capture the value and hence drive demand for storage.
How does adopting an hourly accounting period for energy certificates benefit consumers and the environment? Can you provide some specific examples?
Enabling a consumer to claim to be 100% renewable on an annual basis masks their continued fossil reliance during many hours of the year.
When compared to annual accounting, hourly accounting brings numerous benefits to the consumer and the climate:
1. More consumer transparency about the real provenance of their energy.
2. More realistic carbon accounting, for a consumer to be zero-carbon they must buy clean power every hour of the year and this should be from the same-grid also to ensure power is deliverable.
3. As consumer aim for clean power by the hour, new value signals are created for storage and flexibility that are not there today. Driving demand for these technologies is crucial to meeting net-zero.
Can you elaborate on how accurate carbon accounting is achieved through tracking hourly carbon data with Granular Certificates?
GCs are the elegant tool that makes hourly accounting easy and crucially, ensure no double counting or claiming of clean energy attributes.
To be zero carbon you need to buy GCs in equivalent volume to your hourly consumption from your supplier.
Tracking systems and solution providers are using the latest technology to make this process seamless for consumers.
What role do nodal pricing and new market models play in the adoption and utilization of Granular Certificates?
As GCs much better represent the physical flow and availability of clean energy, they can make clean energy markets look a lot more like standard electricity markets – where power can only be bought if it can be physically “delivered” to consumers i.e in the same hour, from the same market zone (or via proven interconnector delivery).
Short-term markets can add a pure clean power price signal that will reward storage and other technologies capable of delivery clean energy in times of solar and wind shortage.
Long-term market can also be improved as GCs enable “24/7 PPA” models that seek to deliver clean power every hour to consumers in the long run – providing better hedging without gas reliance for consumers and long-term price signals for clean supply and storage.
Can you provide some examples of the demonstrator projects coordinated by the EnergyTag Initiative? What are the key insights or outcomes from these projects so far?
Yes, see the demo page on our website! The key outcomes are that over 1 TWH of hourly tracking has been done to date on project around the world.
GCs are technically proven, the world’s largest organisation are working on them.
Not the challenge is their rapid scale up globally to make clean energy markets aligned with the goals of deep grid decarbonisation – every hour, everywhere.
What are the future plans and aspirations of the EnergyTag Initiative in terms of expanding the use of Granular Certificates and advancing 24/7 energy tracking?
Our mission is to define and build a market for Granular Certificates globally.
We have a lot done but a lot more to do also!
We will continue to work on our 3 strategic pillars – updating our GC standards to help grow harmonised markets globally, enabling market development by promoting pilots and full-fledged GC deals and finally raising awareness about the importance of GCs and 24/7 in policy (i.e for green hydrogen production) and carbon accounting standards (i.e GHG Protocol update).
This is the decarbonisation decade, the IEA says we need zero carbon electricity everywhere by 2040 if we are to stay on track for net zero – clean energy markets must be 24/7 compatible long before that everywhere if they are to play their part.
Conclusion
Learn more about EnergyTag here.