Granular Energy delivers a deceptively simple idea: Create digital tags for each unit of electricity generated. It’s a groundbreaking system that builds upon an existing framework of renewable energy certificates in the U.S. and guarantees of origin in Europe. These clean energy certificates, however, only match renewable energy consumption annually. In contrast, Granular Energy's software matches energy consumption to clean energy sources on an hourly, or even half-hourly, basis, a level of (granular) detail necessary to maximize energy use.

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“Timing is everything,” says Ferenczi, who before co-founding the London-based company started EnergyTag, a nonprofit that develops and promotes standards for electricity tracking and accounting. “We want to move to a system where renewable energy is more expensive when it's in short supply and cheaper when it's in oversupply.”

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Precise matching creates a more accurate price signal, he says, which can drive investment in energy-storage and demand-response systems. It also provides a tool for businesses and individuals interested in decarbonizing their operations. “A lot of the businesses that are benefiting from our software are logistics real estate companies looking to find a way to decarbonize that real estate,” says Ferenczi.

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Another issue is that current energy certification systems allow companies to claim 100% renewable energy use through annual matching, which doesn't accurately reflect real-time grid operations. A company could purchase all its annual clean energy from a single solar farm's June production, ignoring the variability in renewable energy availability. It’s a scenario that doesn’t account for the fact that solar power isn't available at night and renewable energy production fluctuates throughout the day and year. It also doesn’t consider that sometimes there's an excess of renewable energy, leading to the shutdown of solar or wind farms while, at other times, there isn’t enough renewable energy to meet demand.

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Granular Energy, which uses artificial intelligence-like algorithms to optimize the allocation of clean energy, works with over 40 utilities and energy suppliers in 10 different countries, including major players, such as Constellation in the U.S. and A2A in Italy. Its efforts also align with the EU's vision of a fully integrated and digitized energy market. To that end, the three-year-old company—which in 2023 was named the winner of the Free Electrons accelerator program, a competition run by seven of the world's largest energy utilities that drew 519 startups as contestants from 75 countries—partnered with Nord Pool, the main power market operator in Northern Europe. It’s a collaboration designed to demonstrate the first spot market for time-stamped energy certificates. “This is about bringing transparency to power markets,” says Ferenczi.

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And about extracting power from transparency. Ferenczi closes with a clarion call to all electricity consumers: Question any supplier’s unsubstantiated claim that their product is 100% renewable. “Go to your utility and say, ‘Hey, I need to see exactly where my energy is coming from.’ I can't emphasize enough how much power customers have when it comes to incentivizing utilities to deliver clean energy.”

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