Google touted progress on the global expansion of Time-based Energy Attribute Certificates (T-EACs), a tool that provides a more granular view of energy tracking than standard renewable energy credits (RECs).

T-EACs match RECs to the hour they're produced, allowing companies to purchase credits for sustainably-sourced energy at any specific time of the day. With RECs, however, companies buy credits to balance their electricity use on a monthly or yearly basis, and that doesn't guarantee a company actually matches all of its grid-based energy consumption with renewable power from an hour-by-hour perspective.

In order to decarbonize the world's electricity grids, "we need new systems that enable energy consumers, system operators, and governments to know exactly what kinds of energy are being produced, consumed, and traded on an hourly basis across every electricity grid," Maud Texier, who leads energy development for Google, wrote in a blog post.

Once T-EACs are fully developed and deployed inside and outside of Google, its CFE aspirations will be ever closer. But the cloud giant also expects positive impacts to ripple throughout the renewable energy ecosystem.

T-EACs provide meaningful insights into the availability of carbon-free power on electricity grids at all hours of the day, Texier explained. These insights will help consumers understand their energy use and encourage governments to develop quicker and cost-effective decarbonization strategies.

"Perhaps most excitingly, it will also create price signals that stimulate new investments into technologies and projects that deliver carbon-free energy at the times when it’s most needed, accelerating decarbonization across entire electricity grids," she added.

Google has expanded this work in the past year through T-EAC pilot programs across three continents.

In North America, Google partners with M-RETS, a nonprofit that tracks and validates energy attribute certificates, to apply its hourly energy tracking approach to M-RETS' platform. The cloud provider is also working with APX to support hourly RECs within the Southwest Power Pool through APX's North American Renewables Registry platform.

"As a result of this work, electricity generators across the Central and Midwest United States will soon have the option to retire certificates on an hourly basis wherever hourly data is available," Texier explained.

Google's T-EAC pilot program in Chile allowed the provider to match its Chilean data center's hourly energy consumption with hourly generation from three renewable energy projects that meet 100% of that data center's demand. It retired hourly certificates for every REC issued in 2021, which means that renewable energy was verifiably sold and used.

According to Google, this global expansion advances the development of tools and systems to unlock energy data and hourly matching while creating technical standards that will drive widespread adoption of T-EACs.

As T-EACs move further into the mainstream as a more effective method of tracking energy consumption, Texier is most excited about the market transformation and grid-level decarbonization that hourly matching will bring.

"Coupled with growing efforts to update carbon accounting frameworks to better account for the grid-level emissions impact of clean energy projects, this will drive the widespread reallocation of capital toward the highest-impact clean energy projects while giving policy makers new tools to incentivize energy consumers to buy clean power around the clock," Texier explained.

Google plans to continue working with its partners to scale the use of hourly certificates across its own portfolio as it reaches for around the clock carbon-free energy consumption by 2030.