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Glossary · Energy industry & energy transition

Granular Certificates

Granular certificates Guarantees of origin 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Green power electricity procurement Emissions

Granular Certificates (GCs) are certificates documenting the attributes of electricity at high temporal resolution. They record which installation and which energy source a given quantity of electricity came from. They also show the short period in which that quantity was generated. Under the widely used standard of the EnergyTag initiative, a Granular Certificate relates to electricity generated within a period of no more than one hour. In practice, this usually means hourly or quarter-hourly values. The basis remains a quantity of energy in megawatt-hours or kilowatt-hours. What is new is that generation is assigned to exactly one point in time.

A conventional guarantee of origin in the EU also states a generation period, but usually a much longer one. In addition, it can be traded up to twelve months after generation. Over the course of a year, a company can therefore cancel as many certificates from renewable installations as it has consumed in total. On paper, its electricity then counts as green. Such an annual balance does not show whether consumption took place in the hours in which this electricity was actually generated. Granular Certificates partly close this gap because they show whether generation and consumption took place at the same time. This matching is also called temporal matching.

Content and Evidence Logic

A Granular Certificate typically contains the following information: the quantity of energy, the generating installation, the technology, the location or bidding zone, and the generation interval with a timestamp. It is thus a special form of energy attribute certificate. The EnergyTag standard sets requirements for issuing bodies, registries, metering data and cancellation. Version 2 also covers electricity that has been stored. Losses in storage must be taken into account. GCs are either created from existing registries for guarantees of origin or issued in separate systems.

It is important to note that a certificate does not represent a physical delivery of electricity, but a claim to certain attributes of a quantity of electricity. In the grid, electricity is not sorted by contract partner. Generation and consumption must be balanced at every moment, for example through power plant dispatch, storage, imports, exports and flexibility. Granular Certificates do not change this. They do, however, make the allocation of attributes more precise and easier to verify.

An example shows why this matters: an office building consumes 1,000 megawatt-hours a year, and a solar plant also generates 1,000 megawatt-hours in the same year. Calculated over the year, demand is 100 percent covered. Viewed hour by hour, however, electricity is lacking on winter evenings and at night, while there are surpluses on sunny middays. These surpluses cannot fill the gaps. Hourly accounting makes these gaps visible. The share that is actually covered at the same time is then clearly below 100 percent.

Distinction from Electricity Supply, Green Electricity and PPAs

Granular Certificates are not a separate type of electricity. They replace neither the grid connection, nor the electricity supply contract, nor the balancing group. A consumer still needs a supplier, and feed-in and withdrawal are still recorded in balancing groups. A power purchase agreement (PPA), by contrast, governs price, volume, term and risks between generator and buyer. A PPA can include certificates, but does not automatically ensure that generation and consumption match hour by hour. Anyone who sources electricity from a solar PPA still needs electricity from other sources in the evening and in winter. Granular certificates make these deviations visible.

The term green electricity is also vague without rules on evidence. A tariff can be covered on paper by guarantees of origin without enough renewable electricity having been procured for every hour of consumption. Granular certificates replace this claim with a question that can be verified: what quantity of electricity was generated in which hour, and which consumption was allocated to exactly that hour?

Legal and Normative Framework

In the EU, Article 19 of the Renewable Energy Directive governs guarantees of origin. Under amending Directive (EU) 2023/2413 (RED III), the standard size remains 1 MWh. Member States may now, however, issue certificates in fractions that are a multiple of 1 Wh. They are also to enable, where appropriate, a timestamp closer to real time. The generation period can then be aligned, for example, with the imbalance settlement period. The directive enables granular certificates but does not make them mandatory. How and when they are introduced depends on implementation in the respective Member State and its registry. Guarantees of origin remain tradable for twelve months after generation.

Hourly matching, by contrast, is already binding for one specific area: the production of renewable fuels of non-biological origin, such as green hydrogen. Under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/1184, a match within the same calendar month is sufficient until the end of 2029. From 1 January 2030, production must take place in the same hour as the generation of the renewable electricity procured by contract. Exceptions apply to hours with very low electricity prices. By 1 July 2028, the Commission is to assess the consequences of these rules. This requirement applies only to these fuels, not generally to electricity customers.

In voluntary climate reporting, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol is revising its Scope 2 requirements. The draft from the consultation running from October 2025 to January 2026 provided for hourly matching under the market-based method (Scope 2 market-based). Smaller organisations were to be exempted and allowed to use typical load profiles as a substitute for missing hourly values. The summary published in July 2026 shows many critical comments. As of November 2026, hourly matching is not yet a final requirement there.

Connection to 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy

Granular Certificates are the measurement basis for 24/7 carbon-free energy. This refers to the goal of covering electricity consumption in every hour, as far as possible, with CO₂-free generation. "Carbon-free" does not necessarily mean "renewable" here. Depending on the rules, other low-carbon technologies such as nuclear energy count alongside wind, solar, hydropower, biomass and geothermal. The technologies act differently in the system: solar covers the midday hours, wind covers windy periods, and dispatchable low-carbon generation can close gaps in time in a targeted way. Storage merely shifts quantities of electricity. It causes losses in the process and does not generate electricity itself.

Practical Relevance in the Electricity System

The more weather-dependent generation there is, the more important granular certificates become. With the electrification of heating, transport and industry, the timing of consumption also gains importance: heat pumps need electricity above all in cold periods, while data centres run around the clock. Anyone who wants to balance hour by hour must plan load shifting, storage, a mix of different technologies and, where relevant, spatial requirements together. This makes visible what stricter temporal matching costs and how flexibility can reduce those costs. Hours with a high residual load typically become scarce and therefore expensive certificate hours.

Timing also matters for emissions accounting. Anyone who draws additional electricity in an hour with a lot of fossil generation causes more emissions in the short term than in an hour with a lot of renewable feed-in. However, Granular Certificates do not replace a calculation using the marginal emission factor. They show allocated attributes, not which power plants were ramped up or down because of a particular demand decision.

Typical Misunderstandings and Limits

  • Physical purity: even with hourly matching, the electricity comes from the shared grid. The allocation is computational and follows fixed rules. It is more credible than an annual balance, but remains a system of evidence.

  • Locality: an hourly certificate from the same bidding zone is not local supply. If generation and consumption coincide in time but lie on different sides of a grid bottleneck, the actual effect depends on transport capacities and redispatch. Precise temporal matching does not replace spatial delimitation.

  • Additionality: Granular Certificates can come from existing installations. They then improve the quality of the evidence but do not automatically lead to new installations. Whether a procurement brings about additionality depends on contracts, revenues and rules. Strict hourly matching can strengthen this incentive if scarce hours command higher prices.

  • Institutional issues: double counting, the quality of registries, metering data on the consumption side, allocation to installations and recognition in reporting standards remain separate tasks. Without reliable registries, a higher temporal resolution merely shows inaccurate allocations more precisely.

Conclusion: Granular Certificates make electricity procurement verifiable over time. They show gaps that annual balances conceal. Their explanatory power ends, however, where grid restrictions, investment impact, spatial delimitation and actual emission consequences are not regulated as well. The term is apt when it means evidence of electricity attributes allocated in time, not proof of physical delivery or of a comprehensive climate impact.

Sources

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Edited by eCMS on 12.11.2026 05:05

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