The Next Evolution of Renewable Energy Certificates

Renewable energy certificates, or RECS — the credits that companies buy in order to make claims that their operations “run on renewable energy” — are getting more sophisticated.

CleanCounts, a nonprofit that runs one of the biggest registries for RECs in North America, announced on Wednesday that it now has the capability to issue certificates tied to the exact hour the renewable energy was produced, opening the door to more reality-based clean energy claims. For companies that want to match their renewable energy purchases to the hours when their factories and stores are actually consuming power, “that was a critical piece of infrastructure that was missing,” Benjamin Gerber, the CEO of CleanCounts, told me.

The company also announced “additional enhancements” to its registry that will enable a wider range of new REC products, from certificates tied to “pollinator-friendly solar,” to projects owned by indigenous Tribes, to “low-impact hydropower” projects that mitigate harm to fish. Gerber said he thinks having a system to track and verify these benefits will help companies tell a different story about the infrastructure they are building, and in so doing help turn the tide of public support.

Traditionally, a REC represents a megawatt-hour of electricity that has been generated by a renewable energy source such as wind, solar, geothermal, or moving water. The generator records every megawatt-hour it produces with a registry like CleanCounts, which issues certificates; companies then buy these certificates, either in advance under power purchase agreements or after the fact in the spot market. The registry then “retires” the certificates once the REC buyer chooses to “use” it to make a clean energy claim. Registries ensure that nobody is counting the same megawatt-hour more than once.

Today, a lot of corporations simply match their annual energy consumption with certificates. If they anticipate consuming 100 megawatts, they might buy 100 megawatts of solar RECs — even if their factories operate at night — and then claim they “run on 100% renewable energy.” Critics argue these types of claims mislead the public and tip the scales toward the cheapest renewable sources — i.e. solar and wind — rather than those that can generate energy in the off-hours, such as batteries, geothermal, and nuclear. Many clean energy advocates want to see companies move toward making more specific claims about the number of hours they run on renewable energy.

Google got behind this idea several years ago, pledging to match its consumption with clean energy on a 24/7 basis. CleanCounts piloted a method with Google to issue the company hourly RECs, but to do so it had to basically reverse engineer the certificates, embedding data regarding the time the energy was produced after the fact. That made it complicated to true up a company’s energy consumption data with its REC purchases and say, “we covered X number of hours with clean energy.”

Now, CleanCounts will be able to specifically issue a credit for “1 megawatt-hour produced Wednesday, September 16, at 9:00 a.m.,” for example, making it far easier for companies to adopt an hourly matching strategy.

“Instead of breaking it apart, they're basically issuing it as an already granularized tradable certificate,” Alex Piper, the head of policy at EnergyTag, a nonprofit that advocates for hourly matching, told me. “Which is what is new and exciting, and opens the door for more liquid transactions and a broader and more impactful marketplace.”

Hourly matching is not exactly popular in the corporate sustainability world. A lot of companies and sustainability consultants argue that accounting for their energy on an hourly basis will be too complicated, too expensive, and ultimately crater the corporate clean energy market. Corporations are in a showdown with EnergyTag and other proponents of hourly matching to convince the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a nonprofit that sets standards for corporate carbon accounting, of their case.

The new CleanCounts product solves at least one of those challenges, making hourly clean energy procurement much simpler.

That might also reap benefits in the form of consumer trust. New polling from EnergyTag and YouGov found that Americans tend to agree that companies shouldn’t claim to use solar at night. When asked, “When should a company count as a clean energy user?” 45% of respondents selected “only when their clean energy supply matches the hours they actually use electricity,” while 22% chose “when their clean energy averages out over the year (i.e. daytime solar covering nighttime usage.)” Just under a third of the 1,292 respondents selected “don’t know.”

Even if companies start buying hourly RECs, however, another challenge will be figuring out how to tell their customers, most of whom have no idea what a REC is. For years, companies have simply advertised that they are 100% renewable. What will it take to convince customers that actually, “We use clean energy about half the time we operate” is a more laudable claim?