The Problem
It’s a cruel irony that the more successful we are in deploying renewables, the harder they are to integrate it into the grid. Current methods for procuring clean energy match supply and demand over a year and large geographical boundaries, resulting in a disconnect between carbon accounting and grid realities and failing to address the hardest hours of decarbonization. Even when claiming to “100% renewable” an organization may still be reliant on fossil fuels for a significant portion of the day, enabling substantial underreporting of real-world emissions, as demonstrated by leading research in Nature. The lack of data about the time of electricity production on Energy Attribute Certificates is a key root cause of this issue. Given that corporates purchase over 50% of the world’s electricity, fixing these carbon accounting issues is crucial for achieving deep grid decarbonization.