Match every hour of your electricity use with carbon-free generation in the same region. As a sentence, it's simple. As an operating requirement, it's one of the hardest problems in corporate energy.
24/7 carbon-free energy means matching consumption with clean generation every hour, in the same grid region — not just buying enough annual certificates to net out over a year. The concept is intuitive; the operation is hard. It needs hourly metering and generation data, granular time-stamped certificates, accurate forecasting of both load and renewable output, and the flexibility (storage, shiftable demand) to close the gaps when clean supply falls short.
The idea behind 24/7 carbon-free energy (CFE) is almost disarmingly simple. Instead of buying enough renewable energy over a year to net out your consumption — the conventional “100% renewable” claim — you match your electricity use with carbon-free generation every hour, in the same grid region. Real clean power, where and when you actually consume it.
Stated like that, it sounds like an obvious improvement, and conceptually it is. The trouble starts the moment you try to actually do it.
The reason annual matching became the norm is that it’s operationally trivial. You consume power all year, you buy an equivalent volume of renewable certificates over the same year, and the totals cancel. Nobody has to know what was happening on the grid at 7pm on a windless January evening. As we’ve written elsewhere, that convenience is exactly what makes it disconnected from physical reality: you can offset December’s fossil power with July’s solar and call it clean.
24/7 CFE removes that comfort deliberately. By insisting on hourly, regional matching, it forces your clean-energy claim to line up with what was physically happening on the grid at the time. That’s the whole point — and the whole difficulty.
To match consumption with clean generation hour by hour, you need a chain of capabilities that annual matching never required:
Annual matching is an accounting exercise. 24/7 matching is an operations problem — and operations problems don’t yield to spreadsheets.
On most grids, no portfolio of renewables perfectly covers a real consumption profile in every hour. There will be hours of surplus clean energy and hours of shortfall. The entire engineering challenge of 24/7 CFE lives in those gaps: forecasting them, minimising them, and closing the remainder with storage, flexible demand or carefully chosen complementary generation (for example, pairing solar with wind, or adding firm clean supply for the stubborn night-time hours). The closer you push toward 100% hourly matching, the more expensive and operationally demanding each remaining percentage point becomes.
This is why 24/7 CFE is “conceptually clear, operationally hard.” The goal is easy to articulate and easy to agree with. Delivering it is a continuous, data-intensive control problem — and one that connects directly to flexibility, storage strategy and forecasting rather than to procurement alone.
Moving from annual matching to genuine 24/7 CFE means building the data, forecasting and flexibility layer that makes hourly matching operable — measurement, prediction and the control logic to close the gaps. That’s our work, and it ties together demand flexibility and storage dispatch. If you’re targeting hourly carbon-free energy, let’s talk about what it takes operationally.
Moving from annual matching to genuine hourly CFE means building the data, forecasting and flexibility layer that makes it operable. That's exactly what we do.