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New York’s Attentive Energy is now on pause, meaning more pollution, stalled plans, and a tighter margin for error.
As soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of November’s presidential election, climate advocates vowed to continue making progress at the state and local level. But some local projects may still depend too much on federal policy to move forward.
The president-elect’s influence has already put a highly anticipated plan to convert New York City’s biggest power plant into a renewable energy hub on shaky ground. Central to the conversion is a 1,400-megawatt offshore wind farm called Attentive Energy developed by TotalEnergies. Trump, a longtime critic of the industry, has made vague threats to “end” offshore wind “on day one.” While that overstates his capabilities, his administration will, at the very least, have the power to slow the processing of permits.
The regulatory uncertainty was enough to convince Patrick Pouyanne, the CEO of TotalEnergies, to put Attentive Energy on pause, he said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London, according to Bloomberg — though he left open the possibility of reviving it “in four years.”
That’s bad news for the Ravenswood Generating Station in Long Island City, Queens. Ravenswood consists of three steam turbines built in the 1960s that run mostly on natural gas, though sometimes also on oil, plus a natural gas combined cycle unit built in 2004. Together, they emitted nearly 1.3 million metric tons of CO2 in 2023, or about 8% of the city’s carbon emissions from electricity production, while representing more than 20% of the city’s local generating capacity. Ravenswood is also situated across the street from the largest public housing project in the country, and has spewed pollution into the area colloquially referred to as “asthma alley” for decades.
Rise Light and Power, the company that owns the plant, has said it will redress those harms to the community by transforming the site into “Renewable Ravenswood.” The aspiration includes retiring the three 1960s-era generators and replacing them with offshore wind, battery energy storage, and additional renewable energy delivered from upstate New York via a new transmission line. Long term, the company says it will repurpose the plant’s cooling infrastructure to provide clean heating and cooling to buildings in the neighborhood.
Members of the community and local political leaders celebrated the proposal and showed up at rallies and public hearings to support it. Rise Light and Power also incorporated clean energy job training into the plan and earned the support of the union workers who operate the plant. The environmental group Earthjustice recently cited Renewable Ravenswood in a state filing as a shining example of “a more community-centered approach to energy planning.”
The website for Renewable Ravenswood declares that the plan “starts with offshore wind,” and says that “Attentive Energy One is the first step.” When Attentive Energy submitted its initial bid for a power contract with the state last year, Rise Light and Power CEO Clint Plummer told the local outlet City Limits that the wind farm “essentially unlocks ‘Renewable Ravenswood.’”
Now, it's unclear when the promised air quality benefits and jobs will materialize.
When I hopped on the phone with Plummer, the Ravenswood CEO, last week, he downplayed the implications of the pause.
“I don’t think it changes that much,” he told me, stressing that “project delays don't impact our commitment to the vision” and that “it’s simply part of the process of developing these large scale energy infrastructure projects.” Plummer said the company could continue to make progress on permitting, engineering, and other related work on the site and in the community in the meantime. Since New York state has significantly more control over onshore renewables and transmission, he said, it may be possible to move more quickly on those.
The pause on Attentive Energy may have come with or without Trump — the project, which is a joint venture between Rise Light and Power, TotalEnergies, and Corio, had already withdrawn its revised bid for a contract to sell power into New York’s energy market in October. When I asked Attentive for clarification, however, representatives didn’t respond.
The wind farm pause is the third big setback to the company’s replacement plans in as many years.
The first effort to bring clean energy to Ravenswood was a 316-megawatt battery project the New York Public Service Commission approved in 2019. It was slated to be completed by April 2021, but by January of that year, the company had not yet secured an offtake agreement with Con Edison, the local utility, and so asked for a three-year extension. The development still has not broken ground. “Our project, and most like it that have been proposed in New York City, are awaiting the State’s expected battery procurement next year,” a spokesperson told me when I asked for a status update. “We expect that projects that received State incentives through that program will likely be able to proceed to construction quickly.”
The company also submitted a bid to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority in May of 2021 to build a transmission line called the Catskills Renewable Connector that would be capable of delivering 1,200 megawatts of renewable energy from upstate solar and wind farms to the Ravenswood site, meeting up to 15% of the city’s electricity needs. But the agency passed over the proposal in favor of two other transmission lines — Clean Path New York, which would bring renewable power to the city from Western New York, and the Champlain Hudson Power Express, which would deliver hydropower from Canada. (While construction on the latter project is well underway, Clean Path was cancelled the day before Thanksgiving.)
“We weren't selected then, but we’ve continued to mature and advance that project,” Plummer told me, regarding the Catskills line. “All these projects take a very long period of time to realize.”
The only aspect of Renewable Ravenswood that’s still alive and kicking, at least publicly, is the Queensborough Renewable Express, a set of high-voltage power lines that would connect the site to any future offshore wind farms in New York Harbor. The company is currently awaiting approval on a key permit for the line from the New York Public Service Commission. But while much of the project is located within the jurisdiction of New York, part of it will also need federal approvals.
Plummer may not be too concerned about the wind farm’s delay, but a freeze on offshore wind development for the next four years would further stretch New York’s already strained climate goals.
New York law requires the state to get 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% from zero-emissions sources by 2040. The most recent progress report on those goals, compiled by the New York Power Authority, found that the state had enough renewable energy operating and contracted so far to supply about 44% of expected demand in 2030.
A separate state analysis showed that offshore wind would play a key role in reaching the target, with an expected 6 gigawatts of offshore wind generation getting New York about 15% of the way there. But so far, the state has finalized contracts for only about 1.7 gigawatts. Though New York has several additional contracts pending awards, none of those potential projects has yet submitted construction plans to the federal Bureau of Ocean Management. If that office freezes its offshore wind work for the next four years, it’s possible none of them will be able to start construction until the 2030s at the earliest.
“Four years may not be significant for project development time frames,” Daniel Zarrilli, the former chief climate policy advisor for the city of New York, told me. “But the state has these 2030 and 2040 goals, and so many pieces of what makes up the ability to hit those goals are under stress. So it’s certainly not good news.”
New Yorkers aren’t the only ones who will be affected by the pause. Attentive Energy was also working on two additional offshore wind projects that would send power to New Jersey. The developer had already secured a contract to sell power into that state from a 1.3-gigawatt project called Attentive Energy Two. In July, it submitted a bid to New Jersey’s fourth offshore wind solicitation for an additional, unnamed 1.3-gigawatt project. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is expected to reach a decision on that solicitation this month.
I reached out to TotalEnergies to ask whether all three projects were paused or just the New York one, but the company said it would not comment on Pouyanne’s speech. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities also did not respond as to whether Attentive had pulled either its awarded contract or bid.
It’s true that developing these projects takes a long time, and that anyone excited about Renewable Ravenswood should not have expected any new clean power to come into the site until the end of this decade, anyway. But further delays could have real consequences. “Any of these projects faltering is just going to keep New York City reliant on an aging and dirty fossil fleet,” said Zarrilli. The city is in a hole, he said, after the Indian Point nuclear plant closed and made it even more reliant on natural gas for electricity.
On my call with Plummer, he emphasized several times that the city has “the thinnest reserve margins we’ve had in decades” — in other words, it doesn’t have much wiggle room to meet increases in electricity demand. Rise Light and Power has already shut down 17 small gas “peaker” plants that were previously part of Ravenswood to make room for new renewable energy infrastructure. The city will be in better shape in 2026, assuming the Champlain Hudson Power Express finishes on time, according to the New York grid operator NYISO. But by the early 2030s, when additional peaker plants are expected to be shut down due to pollution regulations, New York could be back on thin ice.
By then, the steam turbines at Ravenswood will be nearly 70 years old. Unless significant additional generation comes online by then, Rise Light and Power could be forced to re-invest in those gas generators rather than retire them. “It’d be terrible if they were forced to make that choice in the future,” said Zarrilli.
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Rob and Jesse talk to Ember’s Kingsmill Bond about how electricity is reshaping global geopolitics.
A new stack of electricity technologies — including solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and power electronics — seem to be displacing fossil fuels across China and the developing world. Are we watching an irresistible technological revolution happen? Or is something weirder going on — something that has far more to do with China’s singular scale and policy goals than physics and economics?
Kingsmill Bond argues that a global electrotech revolution has already begun — and that it will soon sweep Europe and the United States, too. Bond is an energy strategist at Ember, a London-based electricity data think tank. He previously worked for more than 30 years as a financial market analyst and strategist, including at Deutsche Bank and Citibank.
On this week’s show, Rob and Jesse talk with Bond about what the electrotech revolution looks like worldwide in 2025, why electricity will win out against fossil fuels, and how American and European climate policy should respond to this moment — and if they can respond at all. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation.
Robinson Meyer: How do we know this is a true solar, battery, EV-led revolution — with the full electrotech, the full beautiful, zero-carbon electrotech stack — and not just the continued march of electrification, which is as happy to accept energy from giant coal plants as it is to accept energy from solar panels.
Kingsmill Bond: It is always fun to debate this, but the point I think you nearly said — countries don’t have solar, but they do have coal — that’s the whole point. Everyone’s got lots of solar today. Unless you’re talking about mine mouth coal and existing assets, solar also beats coal. And that’s why we are spending $400 billion a year on expanding our solar and $40 billion a year, whatever it is, on expanding coal in a very small number of locations.
This coal pathway to development was the China path up to 2000, but they’ve kind of opened up a new pathway that other countries can now take. The classic example now is India, which is clearly taking a very different pathway to that taken by China 20 or 25 years ago. And incidentally, it’s a similar story in the transport market.
Certainly until recently — and indeed, even now for those who haven’t got the memo — are still forecasting that the emerging markets will follow the U.S. development path and have 16 barrels of oil per person per day of demand. But actually, China’s peaked at two and is already falling, and you’re going to see other countries following that path simply because it’s a lot cheaper. Whether or not this was by genius or design or luck, but the Chinese happened to have stumbled into a very, very successful path of finding a cheaper energy source — or a better mousetrap, as it were. I think that that’s what’s now happening across the emerging markets.
If I may make one other point, let us not forget that the emerging markets are going down this path very quickly. And to give you a couple of stats on this, the classic one is the fact that from our calculations, two thirds of the emerging markets, by design, already have a higher share of solar in their electricity system than the United States, which is astonishing given that the United States is a global leader in so many other respects. In terms of electrification, it’s a quarter of the emerging markets, also, ahead of the U.S. — or Europe, actually, for that matter.
And so we are seeing here that the emerging markets are going down a new path, which was not expected. And if you contrast that with the internet, for example — after 2000, internet was a pretty clear, standard graph of the U.S. leads and then Japan follows — and Western Europe, and then China, and then the other markets. But this time around, these folks are streaming into these technologies much earlier than expected.
Mentioned:
Ember’s research on solar-plus-batteries
Oxford’s Doyne Farmer on how clean energy tech will get cheaper
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Xerion is using molten salt to refine the key battery mineral domestically and efficiently.
When John Busbee started his battery technology company in 2010, his strategy was about making just one small part that could be widely used by other manufacturers. He launched Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. at a University of Illinois startup incubator in a bid to commercialize a novel breakthrough in nanostructured foam for the internal components of batteries.
That same logic has since led the company to produce other key materials for the energy transition, including cobalt and, now, gallium, Heatmap has learned.
The same year Busbee started Xerion, some 7,000 miles west across the Pacific, China cut off shipments of rare earth metals to Japan amid a geopolitical spat over contested islands. The move shocked the democratic world and made apparent a troubling fact — that over the preceding few decades, China had seized nearly full control of the global supply of these key metals for magnets and electronics. In the years since, Beijing has used export restrictions on rare earths and other minerals to the U.S. and its allies as a geopolitical cudgel, leading Busbee and others to look for ways to rewire global supply chains away from China.
Xerion had previously experimented with molten salt electrolysis, a process that involves running an electrical current through salt that’s been heated to somewhere from 800 to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to achieve a liquid state, corrosive enough to eat through rock ore but leave behind the desired metals.
Ultimately the team at Xerion found that this method could be used to process cobalt, which is sourced mostly from Chinese-controlled mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The molten salt would eat away at the igneous rock containing the bluish battery metal, leaving behind the mineral. The company opened its pilot cobalt-refining facility in Dayton, Ohio, in April, and reached its goal of producing 5 metric tons for the year.
Now Xerion is expanding into producing gallium. The U.S. has no domestic industry to produce the soft, silvery metal, and imports of the raw material – widely used in solar cells, nuclear sensors, electric vehicle batteries, and semiconductors – have skyrocketed by nearly threefold since 2020. China banned exports to the U.S. in December.
“Gallium was low-hanging fruit,” Busbee told me. “It’s in all the radars. It's in all the missiles. It’s in all the planes. All the new chargers that are really compact are made with gallium nitride. It’s also in the cell phones. And it’s something where China has the market cornered.”
The U.S. stopped producing its own gallium in 1987, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. Before then, the metal came as a byproduct of turning bauxite into aluminum; in China, where the vast majority of global production moved, the government requires alumina refineries to also extract gallium. As alumina processing disappeared in the U.S., there was no market incentive for refineries to invest in the complex process of also extracting gallium, which makes up a tiny fraction of 1% of the total bauxite ore.
At least one major proposed rare earths mine in the U.S., the Sheep Creek site in Montana, boasts large deposits of gallium, and U.S. Critical Materials Corp., the project’s Salt Lake City-based developer, inked a deal to work on building a pilot plant to test its own refining technology with the Idaho National Laboratory this summer. But the project is still at an early stage.
The benefit of using molten-salt electrolysis, Busbee said, is that it provides a shortcut. “I tell people I’m kind of dumb and stubborn,” he said. “What I mean by dumb is that I wasn’t in the industry, so I didn't know that it was widely known that you don’t use this method because it’s so aggressively corrosive that it’s a pain in the butt. And by stubborn I mean that, once we picked that, we stuck with it and spent 10 years optimizing these incredibly corrosive molten salts for the battery space.”
Since the molten salt will eat through nearly everything the Ohio-based Xerion isn’t looking to collect, the process can pull gallium out of mining waste and other sources with low concentrations of the metal.
“It’s a one-step process,” Busbee told me. “A lot of people dissolve in acid, then have to evaporate it and recrystallize it. Sometimes there are multiple rounds. There can be 15 to 100 steps. Ours is one step.”
Asked what the catch might be, Busbee laughed. “It’s been a pinch-me technology,” he said. “As we keep going further, we keep finding good things.”
There’s still some waste rock left behind after the process, and the company said it’s figuring out useful ways to sell that material.
Despite its 15 years in operation, Xerion’s bid to enter the critical minerals market is new enough that many analysts were unfamiliar with the company and its approach. BloombergNEF declined to comment. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the London-based battery metals consultancy, cautioned that Xerion’s claims of “very high recoveries” of materials “seems to be in a lab environment rather than at scale.”
“With respect to Xerion’s original cobalt line, my understanding is this is still at pilot stage, so difficult to compare against industry production,” William Talbot, the lead cobalt analyst at Benchmark, told me via email.
But Ryan Alimento, an energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, said the ability of molten salt to refine minerals to much higher concentrations than water-based solutions is real.
“The advantage of molten salt is exactly what Xerion says,” he told me. Still, he said, opening a pilot plant is just “the first stage in the entrepreneurial valley of death.”
“There’s still a lot more steps needed along the way,” Alimento said. “When you have a company introducing a new processing technology like this that really diverts from the norm, it requires a lot of capital.”
Xerion has raised “a little over $100 million” from venture capitalists and family offices, Busbee said. As the company moves into manufacturing, however, he told me he plans to tap into more large institutional investors. That may offer some promise. Critical minerals are undergoing something of a dealmaking boom as investors clamber for stakes in companies whose metals could win the bonus tax credits the Biden administration offered for domestically-produced materials or avoid the trade penalties the Trump administration has slapped on imports from adversary nations.
President Donald Trump has also used the military to invest directly into rare earths production. The Department of Defense bought a stake in MP Materials, the only active rare earths producer in the U.S., in what The Economist described as the federal government’s biggest intervention in a private company since nationalizing the railroads during World War I. While it’s not a direct ownership stake, the federal Defense Logistics Agency earlier this month awarded Xerion funding through the Small Business Innovation Research program to carry out tests on the economic viability of its technology. Xerion said it expects to complete the first phase of the testing in the first quarter of next year, and plans to pursue grants for the second and third phase analyses.
“This is definitely a priority for the U.S., which is good because what companies need is unambiguous and long-sustained government support for something like this,” Alimento said. “It does not surprise me that a company like Xerion would be thriving in this kind of industrial-policy ecosystem.”
New rules governing how companies report their scope 2 emissions have pit tech giant against tech giant and scholars against each other.
All summer, as the repeal of wind and solar tax credits and the surging power demands of data centers captured the spotlight, a more obscure but equally significant clean energy fight was unfolding in the background. Sustainability executives, academics, and carbon accounting experts have been sparring for months over how businesses should measure their electricity emissions.
The outcome could be just as consequential for shaping renewable energy markets and cleaning up the power grid as the aforementioned subsidies — perhaps even more so because those subsidies are going away. It will influence where and how — and potentially even whether — companies continue to voluntarily invest in clean energy. It has pitted tech heavyweights like Google and Microsoft against peers Meta and Amazon, all of which are racing each other to power their artificial intelligence operations without abandoning their sustainability commitments. And it could affect the pace of emissions reductions for decades to come.
In essence, the fight is over how to appraise the climate benefits of companies’ clean power purchases. The arena is the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a nonprofit that creates voluntary emissions reporting standards. Companies use these standards to calculate emissions from their direct operations, from the electricity and gas that powers and heats their buildings, and from their supply chains. If you’ve ever seen a brand claim it “runs on 100% renewable energy,” that statement is likely backed by a Greenhouse Gas Protocol-sanctioned methodology.
For years, however, critics have poked holes in the group’s accounting rules and assumptions, charging it with enabling greenwashing. In response, the organization has decided to overhaul its standards, including for how companies should measure their electricity footprint, known as “scope 2” emissions.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol first convened a technical working group to revise its Scope 2 Standard last September. By late June, the group had finalized a draft proposal with more rigorous criteria for clean energy claims, despite intense pushback on the underlying direction from companies and clean energy groups.
A flurry of op-eds, essays, and LinkedIn posts accused the working group of being on the “wrong track,” and called the proposal a “disaster” with “unintended consequences.” The Clean Energy Buyers Association, a trade group, penned a letter saying it was “inefficient and infeasible for most buyers and may curtail ambitious global climate action.” Similarly, the American Council on Renewable Energy warned that the plan “could unintentionally chill investment and growth in the clean energy sector.”
Next the draft will face a 60-day public consultation period that begins in early October. “There’ll be pushback from every direction,” Matthew Brander, a professor of carbon accounting at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Scope 2 Working Group, told me. Ultimately, it will be up to the Working Group, the Protocol’s Independent Standards Board, and its Steering Committee, to decide whether the proposal will be adopted or significantly revised.
The challenge of creating a defensible standard begins with the fundamental physics of electricity. On the power grid, electrons from coal- and natural gas-fired power plants intermingle with those from wind and solar farms. There’s no way for companies hooking up to the grid to choose which electrons get delivered to their doors or opt out of certain resources. So if they want to reduce their carbon footprints, they can either decrease their energy consumption — by making their operations more efficient, say, or installing on-site solar panels — or they can turn to financial instruments such as renewable energy certificates, or RECs.
In general, a REC certifies that one megawatt-hour of clean power was generated, at some point, somewhere. The current Scope 2 Standard treats all RECs as interchangeable, but in reality, some RECs are far more effective than others at reducing emissions. The question now is how to improve the standard to account for these differences.
“There is no absolute truth,” Wilson Ricks, an engineering postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and working group member, told me back in June. “I mean, there are more or less absolute truths about things like how much emissions are going into the atmosphere. But the system for how companies report a certain number, and what they’re able to claim about that number, is ultimately up to us.”
The current standard, finalized in 2015, instructs companies to report two numbers for their scope 2 emissions, based on two different methodologies. The formula for the first is straightforward: multiply the amount of electricity your facilities consume in a given year by the average emissions produced by the local power grids where you operate. This “location-based” number is a decent approximation of the carbon emitted as a result of the company’s actual energy use.
If the company buys RECs or similar market-based instruments, it can also calculate its “market-based” emissions. Under the 2015 standard, if a company consumed 100 megawatt-hours in a year and bought 100 megawatt-hours’ worth of certificates from a solar farm, it could report that its scope 2 emissions, under the market-based method, were zero. This is what enables companies to claim they “run on 100% renewable energy.”
RECs are fundamentally different from carbon offsets, in that they do not certify that any specific amount of emissions has been prevented. They can cut carbon indirectly by creating an additional revenue stream for renewable energy projects. But when a company buys RECs from a solar project in California, where the grid is saturated with solar, it will do less to reduce emissions than if it bought RECs from a solar project in Wyoming, where the grid is still largely powered by coal, or from a battery storage project in California, which can produce clean power at night.
There are other ways RECs can vary — for instance, companies can buy them directly from power producers by means of a long-term contract, or as one-off purchases on the spot market. Spot market REC purchases are generally less effective at displacing fossil fuels because they’re more likely to come from pre-existing wind and solar farms — sometimes ones that have been operating for years and would continue with or without REC sales. Long-term contracts, by contrast, can help get new clean energy projects financed because the guaranteed revenue helps developers secure financing. (There are exceptions to these rules, but these are broadly the dynamics.)
All this is to say that the current standard allows for two companies that consumed the same amount of power and bought the same number of RECs to report that they have “zero emissions,” even if one helped reduce emissions by a lot and the other did little to nothing. Almost everyone agrees the situation can be improved. The question is how.
The proposal set for public comment next month introduces more granularity to the rules around RECs. Instead of tallying up annual aggregate energy use, companies would have to tally it up by hour and location. To lower companies' scope 2 footprints further, purchased RECs will have to be generated within the same grid region as the company’s operations, and match a distinct hour of consumption. (This “hourly matching” approach may sound familiar to anyone who followed the fight over the green hydrogen tax credit rules.)
Proponents see this as a way to make companies’ claims more credible — businesses would no longer be able to say they were using solar power at night, or wind power generated in Texas to supply a factory in Maine. While companies would still not be literally consuming the power from the RECs they buy, it would at least be theoretically possible that they could be. “It’s really, in my view, taking how we do electricity accounting back to some fundamentals of how the power system itself works,” Killian Daly, executive director of the nonprofit EnergyTag, which advocates for hourly matching, told me.
The granularity camp also argues that these rules create better incentives. Today, companies mostly buy solar RECs because they’re cheap and abundant. But solar alone can’t get us to zero emissions electricity, Ricks told me. Hourly matching will force companies to consider signing contracts with energy storage and geothermal projects, for example, or reducing their energy use during times when there’s less clean energy available. “It incentivizes the actions and investments in the technologies and business practices that will be needed to actually finish the job of decarbonizing grids,” he said.
While the standard is technically voluntary, companies that object to the revision will likely be stuck with it, as governments in California and Europe have started to integrate the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s methodologies into their mandatory corporate disclosure rules.
The proposal’s critics, however, contend that time and location matching will be so costly and difficult to implement that it may lead companies to simply stop buying clean energy. One analysis by the electricity data science nonprofit WattTime found that the draft revision could increase emissions compared to the status quo if it causes a decline in corporate clean power procurement. “We’re looking at a potentially really catastrophic failure of the renewable energy market,” Gavin McCormick, the co-founder and executive director of WattTime, told me.
Another concern is that companies with operations in multiple regions could shift from signing long-term contracts for RECs, often called power purchase agreements, to relying on the spot market. These contracts must be large to be beneficial for developers because negotiating multiple offtake agreements for a single renewable energy project increases costs and risk. Such deals may still make sense for big energy users like data centers, but a company like Starbucks, with cafes throughout the country, will have to start sourcing fewer RECs in more places to cover all the parts of the world where they operate.
The granularity fans assert that their proposal will not be as challenging or expensive as critics claim — and regardless, they argue, real decarbonization is difficult. It should be hard for companies to make bold claims like saying they are 100% clean, Daly told me. “We need to get to a place where companies can be celebrated for being like, I’m not 100% matched, but I will be in five years,” he said.
The proposal does include carve-outs allowing smaller companies to continue to use annual matching and for legacy clean energy contracts, even if they don’t meet hourly or location requirements. But critics like McCormick argue that the whole point of revising the standard is to help catalyze greater emission reductions. Less participation in the market would hurt that goal — but more than that, these accounting rules aren’t designed to measure emissions, let alone maximize real-world emission reductions. You could still have one company that spends the time and money to invest in scarce resources at odd hours and achieves 60% clean power, while another achieves the same proportion by continuing to buy abundant solar RECs. Both would still get to claim the same sustainability laurels.
The biggest corporate defender of time and location matching is Google. On the other side are tech giants Meta and Amazon, among others, arguing for an approach more explicitly focused on emissions. They want the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to endorse a different accounting scheme that measures the fossil fuel emissions displaced by a given clean energy purchase and allows companies to subtract that amount from their total scope 2 footprint — much more akin to the way carbon offsets work.
If done right, this method would recognize the difference between a solar REC in California and one in Wyoming. It would give companies more flexibility, potentially deploying capital to less developed parts of the world that need help to decarbonize. It could also, eventually, encourage investment in less mature and therefore more expensive resources, like energy storage and geothermal — although perhaps not until there’s solar panels on every corner of the globe.
This idea, too, is risky. Calculating the real-world emissions impact of a REC, which the scope 2 working group calls “consequential accounting” is an exercise in counterfactuals. It requires making assumptions about what the world would have looked like if the REC hadn’t been purchased, both in the near term and long term. Would the clean energy have been generated anyway?
McCormick, who is a proponent of this emissions-focused approach, argues that it’s possible to measure the counterfactual in the electricity market with greater certainty than with something like forestry carbon offsets. With electricity, he told me, “there's five minute-level data for almost every power plant in the world, as opposed to forests. If you're lucky, you measure some forests, once a year. It's like a factor of 10,000 times more data, so all the models are more accurate.”
Some granularity proponents, including Ricks, agree that consequential accounting is valuable and could have a place in corporate reporting, but worry that it’s ripe for abuse. “At the end of the day, you can't ever verify whether the system you're using to assign a given company a given number is right, because you can't observe that counterfactual world,” he said. “We need to be very cautious about how it’s designed, and also how companies actually report what they’re doing and what level of confidence is communicated.”
Both proposals are flawed, and both have potential to allow at least some companies to claim progress on paper while having little real-world impact. In some ways, the disagreement is more philosophical than scientific. What should this standard be trying to achieve? Should it be steering corporate dollars into clean energy, accuracy of claims be damned? Or should it be protecting companies from accusations of greenwashing? What impacts do we care about more, faster emissions reductions or strategic decarbonization?
“They’re actually not opposing views,” McCormick told me. “There’s these people making this point and there’s these people making this point. They’re running into each other, but they’re actually not saying opposite things.”
To Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, a carbon accounting research and training nonprofit, people are attempting to hide policy questions within the logic and principles of accounting. “We’re asking the emissions inventories to do too much — to do more than they can — and therefore we end up with a mess,” he told me. Corporate disclosures serve many different purposes — helping investors assess risk, informing a company’s internal target setting and performance tracking, creating transparency for consumers. “A corporate inventory might be one little piece of that puzzle,” he said.
Gillenwater is among those that think the working group’s time- and location-matching proposal would stifle corporate investment in clean energy when the goal should be to foster it. But his preferred solution is to forget trying to come up with a single metric and to encourage companies to make multiple disclosures. Companies could publish their location-based greenhouse gas inventory and then use market-based accounting to make a separate “mitigation intervention statement.” To sum it up, Gillenwater said, “keep the emissions inventory clean.”
The risk there is that the public — or indeed anyone not deeply versed in these nuances — will not understand the difference. That’s why Brander, the Edinburgh professor, argues that regardless of how it all shakes out, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol itself needs to provide more explicit guidance on what these numbers mean and how companies are allowed to talk about them.
“At the moment, the current proposals don’t include any text on how to interpret the numbers,” he said. “It’s almost incredible, really, for an accounting standard to say, here’s a number, but we’re not going to tell you how to interpret it. It’s really problematic.”
All this pushback may prompt changes. After the upcoming comment period closes in late November or early December, the working group could decide to revise the proposal and send it out for public consultation again. The entire revision process isn’t estimated to be completed until the end of 2027 at the earliest.
With wind and solar tax credits scheduled to sunset around then, voluntary action by companies will take on even greater importance in shaping the clean energy transition. While in theory, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol solely develops accounting rules and does not force companies to take any particular action, it’s undeniable that its decisions will set the stage for the next chapter of decarbonization. That chapter could either be about solving for round-the-clock clean power, or just trying to keep corporate clean energy investment flowing and growing, hopefully with higher integrity.