David Roberts......Hello, everybody. This is Volts for October 29, 2025, “The escalating battle over renewable energy certificates (RECs).” I’m your host, David Roberts. You’ve probably seen it a million times: a business claiming to be run on “100% clean energy.” What does that mean exactly? How difficult is it to achieve? Back in September, I put out a podcast on the ongoing controversy over the standards that govern voluntary corporate procurement of clean energy, wherein businesses buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) and are subsequently allowed to claim to have offset their dirty energy use. I realize this topic sounds somewhat obscure and wonky — perhaps too obscure and wonky for two pods! — but I promise it is extremely important. Big corporate energy buyers make up a substantial portion of the total market for clean energy in the US, and given the complete collapse of federal support, their role is going to be even more significant going forward. (I highly recommend listening to that pod before this one.) 

In brief, the International Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a set of rules and standards that governs the measurement and reporting of greenhouse gases worldwide, is being updated for the first time in 10 years, and corporate procurement standards fall under that rubric. It is widely agreed that current standards are too lax — lots of companies are claiming to run on “100% clean energy,” even though the RECs they buy have little effect on emissions or on the overall energy mix. The solution is for the standards to get more granular, to require the companies that want to claim they run on clean energy to procure not just any clean energy, but clean energy that is produced at the hour when and on the same grid where they are consuming energy.

In September’s pod, I talked with some folks who are worried that too much granularity too quickly could stifle this market. Today, I’m speaking with people who take the opposite perspective. They believe that greater granularity will make corporate procurement more transparent, honest, and impactful. Wilson Ricks is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and a member of the Technical Working Group updating these rules in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (and a previous Volts guest). Killian Daly, also a member of that working group, is the executive director of EnergyTag, a nonprofit focused on carbon accounting. We are going to discuss what is happening with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the merits and risks of greater granularity, and the future of corporate clean energy procurement. Without further ado, Wilson Ricks, Killian Daly, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.                     

David Roberts......There’s a lot here. Let’s just start. Remind us where we are in all this. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is being updated. The corporate energy part, the scope, is called Scope 2 — your electricity consumption emissions. Scope 2 accounting is being updated as part of that larger Greenhouse Gas Protocol. I believe the Scope 2 working group has put out a discussion draft of this proposed update. Is that where we are? What comes next?                                              Killian Daly.......Just to take a step back, Scope 2 is about how companies account for the electricity supplied to them. There are two methodologies for doing that. There’s a location-based method, which takes the grid average, or else you look at the contracts you have. Before EnergyTag, I used to do this as a practitioner. I used to do Scope 2 for a French company called Air Liquide, which consumes more electricity than Ireland. I’ve done this at a pretty big scale — I’ve bought power at a very big scale. When I was going and buying electricity, that was one thing where you have respect for physical limits. You have to time-match your power purchases. You have to look at what boundary you can buy that power from — what EU country or bidding zone in the European case. Then you go to the green accounting world and you’re in a parallel universe. You’re in a world that doesn’t really respect any of those limits and rules. That has caused some controversy, as you covered earlier, about these green claims — about companies getting to 100% renewable without doing the real job of getting to 100% renewable.

David Roberts......We should just say that the standard right now is that you can buy RECs from anywhere, annually, averaged from any geography. There are currently no geographic or temporal restrictions on where you can buy RECs. Is that correct? Killian Daly......There are some level of restrictions, but you can buy from anywhere in Europe. One example we always use is Iceland, which has never exported an electron, but it is quite a big exporter of green electricity certificates. There are no geographical limits —                                                                   

David Roberts......Because of geothermal.                                                                                                                        Killian Daly......Or hydro in Iceland. Also, you can be solar powered at night. That’s the other classic one to do with temporality. You can use solar produced in May on a dark winter’s night in December and claim to be renewable at that time. This time matching and geographical matching just don’t make any physical sense when we think about the classic way that power works on electricity grids and power markets.....read or listen to the podcast        https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-escalating-battle-over-renewable?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=193024&post_id=176583782&utm_campaign=email-post-