The Case for Granular Hourly Matching in Scope 2 Reporting

Corporate sustainability reporting has reached an inflection point. For years, organisations have satisfied their Scope 2 obligations by purchasing renewable energy certificates and matching their annual electricity consumption against an equivalent volume of renewable generation regardless of when either actually occurred. An office running on fossil-fuel power at 9pm on a winter evening could claim 100% renewable on the strength of a solar certificate generated at noon in January. The numbers balanced on paper. The climate did not benefit in kind.
Granular hourly matching (24/7 matching) closes the gap by requiring that each megawatt-hour of consumption be matched with generation from the same hour, in the same market. It transforms Scope 2 reporting from an accounting exercise into a genuine signal of physical renewable consumption.  
The case for this approach is now compelling across every dimension: environmental integrity, market credibility, regulatory trajectory, and long-term commercial value.
‍

The Fundamental Problem with Annual Matching

Annual and monthly matching systems were designed for a simpler grid era. They assume that renewable energy injected anywhere on a network at any time effectively displaces fossil generation consumed anywhere else. This assumption was always a simplification, but it has become increasingly untenable as grids become more dynamic and corporate sustainability claims face more intense scrutiny.
The core problem is temporal mismatch. When a corporate buyer retires an annual Energy Attribute Certificate (EAC) or Renewable Energy Certificate (REC), that certificate may represent generation that occurred months before or after the consumption it is meant to cover. During the hours when renewable supply is genuinely scarce early mornings, windless winter evenings, the grid draws more heavily on thermal generation. Annually matched buyers are, in practice, consuming that thermal electricity while claiming renewable status. The result is a systematic over-statement of renewable achievement and an under incentivisation of storage, demand flexibility, and diverse generation capacity that would actually decarbonise those more difficult hours.
Granular hourly matching corrects this directly. A buyer who must match every hour has an immediate commercial incentive to understand and reshape their consumption profile, to source from generators whose output complements their load curve, and to invest in storage or demand response to bridge the gaps. The certificate market stops rewarding abundant midday solar and starts rewarding the dispatchable, flexible, and temporally reliable renewable supply that actually matters for grid decarbonisation.
‍

What Hourly Matching Demands — and Enables

The transition to 24/7 matching is not trivial. It requires sophisticated monitoring and verification infrastructure capable of capturing and reconciling temporal data on both the generation and consumption sides.
Energy supply contracts must also become more dynamic. Fixed annual volumes give way to structures that can accommodate the variability of renewable generation incorporating storage provisions, demand response clauses, fail-over arrangements, and real-time balancing mechanisms. Power Purchase Agreements that blend fixed-price and market-price components are emerging as a practical tool, allowing buyers to hedge against periods of insufficient generation while maintaining overall renewable alignment. Long-term EAC contracts and pooled procurement arrangements across organisations and geographies offer additional resilience.
Yet the demands of hourly matching also generate their own solutions. The requirement to manage at an hourly level accelerates investment in battery storage and pumped hydro. It incentivises diversified renewable portfolios combining wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal because diversity reduces the potential of simultaneous generation shortfalls.
‍

The Integrity Dividend for Corporate Buyers

For corporate energy buyers, the shift to hourly matching is fundamentally a question of credibility. Scope 2 reporting frameworks, including the GHG Protocol's market-based method, are only as meaningful as the certificates that underpin them.  
Hourly matching aligns corporate reporting with the emerging standards that matter most. Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) guidance, ISSB disclosure requirements,  and RE100 initiatives are all moving toward expectations of greater temporal granularity.  
Early adopters gain a competitive differentiation. In markets where customers and partners prioritise transparency and environmental stewardship, the ability to demonstrate genuine, hour-by-hour renewable alignment is a meaningful differentiator. It signals operational sophistication, long-term strategic thinking, and a commitment to substance over optics — qualities that matter increasingly to institutional investors, procurement teams, and talent.

‍
The Producer Imperative: Certification as Strategy

For renewable energy producers, hourly matching is not merely a compliance burden — it is a commercial opportunity. In an annual-matching world, all EACs are broadly fungible: a certificate from a wind farm is worth roughly the same as one from a solar farm, regardless of when each generated its electricity. Hourly matching ends that fungibility and creates genuine price differentiation based on temporal value.
Generators whose output profile aligns with peak demand periods or who can offer storage-backed dispatchability, will command a premium. The ability to provide audit-grade, hourly-granular certificates transforms certification from an administrative cost into a revenue driver. Robust certification infrastructure, with automated issuance and retirement, immutable audit logs, and reporting automation, directly enables the monetisation of renewable attributes that would otherwise go unrecognised.
High-integrity certification also matters beyond the spot market. For project finance and infrastructure investment, demonstrable alignment with global reporting standards — SBTi, ISSB, RE100 — improves bankability, supports higher valuation multiples, and widens access to capital. Institutional investors are increasingly applying ESG screens that favour producers with transparent, auditable certification systems. In this context, the quality of a producer's certification partner is a direct input to its cost of capital.

‍
Regulatory Direction of Travel

Regulatory frameworks are catching up with market reality. Across Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region, policymakers are actively examining how existing EAC and REGO regimes need to evolve to support granular matching. The direction of travel is clear: hourly or sub-hourly attribution is the destination, with annual matching increasingly viewed as a transitional arrangement.
Governments and regulatory bodies will need to update compliance verification mechanisms to support hourly matches and align with international standards. For market participants, whether buyers, producers, or intermediaries, this regulatory trajectory reinforces the case for investment in hourly-matching capability.  
Those who wait for mandates will face a compressed implementation timeline and the reputational cost of having operated under a lower standard when a higher one was available.

‍
From Accounting to Action

Perhaps the most important argument for hourly matching is the most straightforward: it changes behaviour in ways that actually matter for the energy transition. Annual matching, at its worst, allows organisations to claim renewable status while remaining largely indifferent to when and how they consume electricity. Hourly matching makes that indifference costly.
When every hour counts, buyers engage more deeply with their consumption profiles. They invest in demand flexibility, explore storage, negotiate more sophisticated supply arrangements, and pay attention to the temporal shape of their load in ways that annual matching never required.  
Generators compete to offer temporally reliable supply, accelerating exactly the kinds of investment like batteries, diversified portfolios, smart grid integration that the energy transition requires most.
Consumer awareness deepens too. Granular reporting gives organisations genuine insight into their energy consumption patterns insight that supports smarter operational decisions around demand response, and a more authentic engagement with sustainability goals. The certificate stops being a compliance instrument and starts being a tool for understanding and improving real-world performance.

‍
Conclusion

The transition from annual to hourly matching in Scope 2 reporting is not a minor technical adjustment. It is a fundamental recalibration of what corporate renewable energy claims mean. It demands more of buyers, more of producers, and more of the systems that connect them. But it delivers something that annual matching cannot: an honest account of whether consumption and generation are genuinely aligned, hour by hour, across the full complexity of a modern energy system.
Those who lead rge move to hourly matching will gain credibility, competitive advantage, and regulatory resilience. Those who wait, will find themselves defending a standard that the market has left behind.
Hourly matching is where Scope 2 reporting grows up. The time to start is now.

‍