Integrating Deliverability Into Voluntary Clean Energy Market Boundaries White Paper | Enhance Your Clean Energy Goals Today — Singularity
White Paper
Where matters: Integrating deliverability into voluntary clean energy market boundaries
Singularity Energy
Greg Miller, PhD - Policy & Research Lead
Gailin Pease - Data Scientist
Wenbo Shi - Founder & CEO
Brattle Group
Long Lam, PhD - Senior Associate
Kathleen Spees, PhD - Principal
Jadon Grove - Research Analyst
Ivy Yang - Research Analyst
Prepared by:
Summary
“ Where matters: Integrating deliverability into voluntary clean energy market boundaries” is a white paper released by Singularity Energy with contributions from The Brattle Group and prepared for Google. The white paper introduces a new framework that can be used to help design more credible, impactful, and practical procurement boundaries for voluntary clean energy markets.
Voluntary procurement by corporate buyers has accounted for over 68 gigawatts of clean energy capacity added to the U.S. grid since 2014. These significant voluntary contributions to the clean energy transition have been guided and supported by procurement and carbon accounting standards such as the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, RE100, and CDP.
However, there is a growing need for these standards to better align voluntary procurement with the physical and market realities of today’s electricity system. The framework presented in this paper is intended to help standards setters increase the credibility and consistency of clean energy claims and Scope 2 carbon accounting.
Read the Executive Summary
Deliverability White Paper Executive Summary.pdf - Google Drive
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Where matters:
Integrating deliverability
into voluntary clean energy
market boundaries
Executive Summary
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AUTHORED BY
Singularity Energy
Gregory Miller, Ph.D.
Gailin Pease
Wenbo Shi, Ph.D.
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM
The Brattle Group
Long Lam, Ph.D.
Kathleen Spees, Ph.D.
Jadon Grove
Ivy Yang
August 2023
Prepared for and supported by
Google LLC
Authorship notes: Singularity authored the report, including developing the framework, evaluation criteria, case study, and modeled evidence. The Brattle Group contributed subject-matter expertise on electricity systems and markets, and survey of procurement boundaries in standards and policies. The authors wish to acknowledge members of the Google climate team for thoughtful comments and inputs on earlier drafts of this report.
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Executive Summary
Background
The voluntary clean energy market continues to play a growing and essential role in grid decarbonization. Voluntary procurement by corporate buyers has accounted for over 68 GW of clean energy capacity added to the U.S. grid since 2014, and voluntary purchases comprised about 6% of U.S. retail electricity sales in 2021, growing at a rate of about 20% year over year.
Standards and initiatives such as the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, CDP, and RE100 all broadly incentivize voluntary procurement and influence the specific types of procurement decisions that are made. In addition to encouraging procurement from specific types of energy technologies, these standards and initiatives also importantly define the geographic boundaries within which a buyer can procure energy to comply with the standard.
The extent to which the location of procured electricity matches the location where a buyer consumes electricity has an impact both on the credibility of an individual buyer’s claim to be consuming the clean energy it procures, and on the aggregate impact of the voluntary market on the long-term success of the energy transition and full grid decarbonization.
Given the important role that standards play in shaping where voluntary buyers procure energy and the degree to which their procurement contributes to grid decarbonization, it is critical that standards setters define procurement boundaries using a process that is structured, transparent, and grounded in the reality of how electricity markets and electric power systems function. Today, boundaries are often poorly defined, unclear in their rationale, and not reflective of power markets and operations. They are often interpreted inconsistently, resulting in double-counting and the weakening of voluntary demand signals.
This is particularly true for the GHG Protocol’s Scope 2 Guidance on market-based accounting. This accounting approach, which allows companies to use market-based instruments to calculate their emissions from consumed electricity, lacks clear or robust guidance on the geographic boundaries within which clean energy can be purchased in order to match consumption and reduce market-based scope 2 inventories. Specific weaknesses of the current guidance include:
• The current guidance focuses on aligning with energy attribute certificate (EAC) markets, rather than electricity markets themselves. While electricity markets are designed to reflect the underlying power system and ensure that market transactions contribute to 1 Clean Energy Buyers Association Deal Tracker; NREL “Status and Trends in the Voluntary Market (2021 Data)
2 Ricks et al., “Minimizing emissions from grid-based hydrogen production in the United States,” Environmental Research Letters (2023);
Xu et al., “System-level Impacts of 24/7 Carbon-free Electricity Procurement,” Princeton University (2021);
Riepin and Brown, “System-level Impacts of 24/7 Carbon-free Electricity Procurement in Europe,” TU Berlin (2022);
International Energy Agency, “Advancing Decarbonisation Through Clean Electricity Procurement” (2022).