Companies striving for net-neutral climate impact find common clean energy procurement strategies largely ineffective in the U.S., according to a Princeton-led study. However, an hourly matching approach—procuring clean energy in real-time to match consumption—significantly reduces emissions, unlike the common annual matching strategy which fails to impact long-term emissions.
Another up-and-coming procurement strategy, known as emission or carbon matching, in which clean energy is procured in an attempt to offset the total carbon emissions that result from a buyer’s electricity consumption, similarly had little to no effect on reducing long-term emissions in the U.S. Coauthor Wilson Ricks, graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering, stands at Princeton University’s solar array. Credit: Bumper DeJesus, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
While seeming to make intuitive sense at a glance, Jenkins said that much like the volumetric approach, the emission matching approach fails to consider the counterfactual scenario in which the wind project would have been built anyway because of its low costs. As a result, the company would not be contributing additional clean energy supply but instead displacing what was likely to become a wind farm regardless.