Time-based energy attribute certificates (T-EACs) are a new way of accounting for your carbon footprint. Could this new method help make your IT use energy efficient?
Time-based energy attribute certificates (T-EACs) could help organizations to offset their carbon footprint with renewable energy. They have the potential to empower organizations with hourly monitoring of their energy use to enable detailed analysis and response.
While monitoring your carbon footprint is nothing new, real-time tracking is becoming a necessary step for organizations operating in a 24/7 market. Since IT generates the same amount of carbon as the entire aviation industry, this activity is falling on technical teams and IT leaders need to become familiar with T-EACs.
Let's start by looking at the previous energy attribute certificate (EAC) system. From there, we can consider the advantages to the new T-EACs.
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Energy attribute certificates (EACs) are awards that can be purchased to confirm the energy that your organization consumes is renewable. They act as tokens that you can use to confirm to regulators that you are using sustainable energy.
Organizations can purchase EACs from energy suppliers as part of a bundle with their electricity. Each megawatt of renewable energy your business uses will generate a certificate confirming the source of that energy was sustainable, and this can then be shown to regulators as proof of your efforts.
Types of EACs include Guarantees of Origin (GOs) in Europe, Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) in the USA, and International RECs (I-RECs) in the EMEA region. Various regulators and sustainability schemes process EACs, including the Carbon Disclosure Project, RE100, RobecoSAM, and the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices.
Traditionally, EACs are produced on a monthly basis, so they can be evidenced to regulators as part of monthly reporting. However, as the pace of the market accelerates, this may not be sufficient.
Monthly reporting could hide spikes and troughs in renewable energy usage at different times of the month that may be relevant to reporting. This is why Google began piloting time-based energy attribute certificates (T-EACs).
Time-based energy attribute certificates (T-EACs), also known as granular certificates (GCs), are a technologically advanced type of energy attribute certificate (EAC). Live monitoring of electricity use has enabled EACs to be generated on an hourly basis enabling advanced, detailed tracking of energy use.
T-EACs allow you to track how much renewable energy you're using and offset it against your carbon footprint in real time. You can identify the hour of the day that your company is using renewable energy and from which source.
Google first trialed T-EACs in 2021, in partnership with The Midwest Renewable Energy Tracking System (M-RETS). M-RETs is a non-profit organization supporting renewable energy monitoring in the USA.
T-EACs were tested in the midwest USA, Denmark, and later Chile. The intention was to create a third-party-verified Guarantee of Origins (GO) that could be generated on an hourly basis.
Google has hope that this type of granular energy tracking tool will make deep analysis of renewable energy use by organizations viable. This kind of monitoring should provide real insight into ways that sustainable energy use can be expanded.
The possibility of hourly tracking sounds incredible, but a natural question arises: do we really need to invest in hourly tracking in order to understand renewable energy use?
Time-based energy attribute certificates (T-EACs) are being implemented by Google in order to track companies' renewable energy use on an hourly basis. Is it really worth looking at your energy use in this level of detail?
Google certainly believes so, and there's plenty of reason to believe they know what they're talking about. Detailed energy use analysis is necessary to compare your renewable energy usage to the rest of the grid.
Let's say a company runs a data center 24 hours a day from the main electricity grid with no attempt to use renewable energy sources. Overnight, the grid may switch to using renewable energy, while during the day, increased use may revert it to non-renewable sources.
At the end of the month, that company's traditional energy attribute certificates (EACs) might note that their data center is running on 30% renewable energy sources from its overnight usage. However, that would not have been through any effort of their own.
On the other hand, your organization may only run during the day, but you have made an effort to invest in renewable energy for 20% of its electricity use. To the regulator, however, you would seem to be making less effort to be sustainable.
Inaccurate reporting like this can lead to regulators, governments, and organizations, making sub-optimal choices regarding IT sustainability. Google hopes that T-EACs will enhance reporting and lead to the right decisions being made for the environment.
The development of time-based energy attribute certificates (T-EACs) is a key initiative in enhancing reporting on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. SAP LeanIX sees this as vitally important for achieving IT sustainability.
That's why we partnered with PwC to create our ESG fact sheets within SAP LeanIX. These fact sheets allow you to track information about the carbon footprint of your software applications and conduct advanced reporting.
Our fact sheets are fully customizable, allowing you to link them to T-EAC information, once you have access to it. This ensures that you can monitor IT sustainability in granular detail and real-time.
To find out more about SAP LeanIX ESG capability maps, download our co-authored whitepaper: