Solutions
QET-ELEC: Registry-Grade Renewable Electricity Certificates Built for Hourly Matching
For data center sustainability programs running 24/7 carbon-free electricity (CFE) procurement, electric utilities offering verified renewable products to corporate customers, corporate Scope 2 procurement teams operating under the GHG Protocol Scope 2 Quality Criteria, renewable electricity project developers monetizing verified attributes, and ESG teams preparing the disclosure cycle, QET-ELEC is the registry-grade environmental-attribute certificate engineered for the hourly-matching, temporal-granularity, geographic-deliverability era of Scope 2 market-based procurement. The annual-matching REC vintage is closing. The hourly-matching standard is opening. This page is the buyer's view of how a verified renewable electricity certificate built for that transition actually operates.
QET-ELEC, in one paragraph. QET-ELEC is Greentruth's tokenized renewable electricity certificate — each token represents 1 MWh of renewable electricity with hourly timestamp, generator location, generation technology, and grid region attributes, verified under ISO 14064-3 reasonable assurance on the EarnDLT blockchain registry (Hedera Hashgraph). Engineered to satisfy the GHG Protocol Scope 2 Quality Criteria temporal matching, geographic deliverability, and unique-instrument tests as they tighten toward hourly matching. DID-compliant identifiers make every certificate machine-consumable by ESG software and the autonomous procurement and compliance agents the industry is converging on.
Request a Demo
See How a Hyperscaler or Utility Uses QET-ELEC
Request a demo and we'll walk hourly-matched Scope 2 procurement end to end — project data through ISO 14064-3 verification, mint, acquisition, and irrevocable retirement against a documented Scope 2 claim.
What QET-ELEC Actually Is (the Buyer's View)
If you arrived from a Core Concept methodology read, the methodology sibling explains exactly how the product works mechanically. This page is the buyer-side view of why it exists, what procurement problem it solves, and how a corporate Scope 2 program actually consumes it.
Three properties define the product for a buyer:
- One MWh, hourly-timestamped, audit-defensible. Each token represents 1 MWh of renewable electricity with explicit hourly generation timestamp, generator location and grid region, and generation technology (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, storage-paired). The verification chain is ISO 14064-3 reasonable assurance with an accredited ISO 14065:2020 verifier of record anchored to the on-chain mint.
- Built for the Scope 2 Quality Criteria that are actually tightening. The GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance's temporal matching, geographic deliverability, and unique-instrument tests are the architectural target. As the Scope 2 Guidance update (in consultation) moves the market toward hourly matching, the product is engineered to clear that bar rather than rebuild around it.
- Procurement-ready as a registry-grade EAC. Acquisition, transfer, and retirement run through the same EarnDLT registry every other QET class does, with the same Machine-Ready API surface, the same framework-aligned exports at retirement, and the same unified Marketplace inventory. Your Scope 2 procurement team operates one workflow across renewable-electricity certificates and the rest of the QET portfolio.
Who QET-ELEC Is Built For
The buyer population for hourly-matched renewable electricity certificates is concentrated in a specific set of programs that have moved past annual matching, plus the supply-side actors that serve them.
Data centers and hyperscalers running 24/7 CFE. The data center industry has led the move from annual-matching RECs to hourly-matched CFE. Large hyperscaler procurement programs operate against published frameworks targeting hourly carbon-free electricity matching, with the documentation discipline to support it. QET-ELEC produces the certificate-level structure those programs require.
Electric utilities offering verified renewable products. Investor-owned utilities and competitive retail providers building differentiated green-tariff programs for commercial and industrial customers. The customer-side ask increasingly requires hourly-granularity attribution; QET-ELEC is the upstream procurement instrument that lets the utility package those attributes for downstream corporate Scope 2 disclosure.
Corporate Scope 2 procurement teams under GHG Protocol Quality Criteria. Companies with near-term Scope 2 reduction targets under SBTi, CSRD ESRS E1, IFRS S2, SB 253, and TCR — needing the documentation discipline to demonstrate temporal matching, geographic deliverability, and unique-instrument compliance as those tests tighten.
Renewable electricity project developers. Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and storage-paired project operators seeking registry-grade attribute monetization. Developers participating in 24/7 CFE programs benefit specifically from the hourly-granularity attribute structure that traditional annual RECs cannot deliver.
ESG teams preparing the disclosure cycle. Even outside explicit 24/7 procurement, teams operating across multi-framework disclosure (GHG Protocol, SBTi, CDP, CSRD, IFRS S2, SB 253, TCR) increasingly need primary-data, ISO-verified electricity attribute documentation that holds up under tightening assurance expectations.
The Hourly-Matching Shift: Why Annual RECs No Longer Hold Up
The single most important context for QET-ELEC procurement is the structural shift in how Scope 2 market-based claims are evaluated. Three forces are moving the market in the same direction.
- The Scope 2 Guidance update. The GHG Protocol's Scope 2 Guidance update has been in consultation through 2025–2026, and the trajectory tightens the temporal-matching, geographic-deliverability, and unique-instrument requirements. Annual-matching RECs that satisfied the original 2015 guidance face hardening expectations for hourly granularity, narrower deliverability windows, and stricter unique-instrument enforcement. Companies setting Scope 2 targets in 2026 are designing programs that will validate under the next version of the guidance, not the prior one.
- Hyperscaler procurement pressure. Data center sustainability programs operating at scale — those publicly committed to 24/7 carbon-free electricity goals — have effectively raised the integrity standard for the entire corporate procurement market. When the largest electricity buyers in the world operate against hourly-matched documentation, that becomes the de facto integrity floor for the next reporting cycle.
- Grid emissions reality. As renewable penetration grows, the gap between annual-average grid carbon intensity and hour-specific carbon intensity grows with it. A REC retired for a coal-heavy 3 a.m. hour on a winter Tuesday is not equivalent to one retired for an oversupplied 11 a.m. hour on a sunny Saturday — and the major frameworks are increasingly explicit that the equivalence assumption no longer holds.
The practical implication: a Scope 2 procurement program designed in 2026 needs documentation that survives the 2028 and 2030 review cycle. QET-ELEC is engineered to be that documentation — hourly-timestamped, ISO 14064-3 verified, registry-grade chain of custody preserved on-chain.
The GHG Protocol Scope 2 Quality Criteria Architecture
The GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance establishes the architectural tests a market-based instrument must satisfy — and a single QET-ELEC retirement satisfies all four at one transaction, without manual reconciliation across disparate documentation systems. How QET-ELEC maps to each:
Temporal matching
The instrument's vintage and the consumption it claims must align in time. The annual-matching baseline is the floor; the consultation trajectory pushes toward hourly matching. QET-ELEC carries explicit hourly generation timestamps on every token, so the temporal-matching test can be enforced at the procurement-decision level rather than approximated at year-end.
Geographic deliverability
The instrument's generation location and the consumption location must sit on the same grid (or interconnected grid) where physical delivery is plausible. Each token records the generator's grid region and the deliverable scope, with the Discovery interface filtering inventory by the buyer's load location.
Unique instrument
Each unit of generation produces exactly one certificate, retired exactly once, against exactly one claim. Single-mint enforcement at the Hedera-anchored registry layer makes this mechanical rather than contractual, and irrevocable on-chain retirement prevents the same token from being re-traded after retirement.
Producer policy attribution and contractual instruments
The guidance also requires the contractual instrument convey both the renewable claim and the underlying environmental attribute, with explicit retirement against the buyer's reporting period. The QET-ELEC retirement record captures the buyer's claim identifier, the reporting period, and the framework-aligned export simultaneously.
Request a Demo
Walk a Live Hourly-Matching Scenario
Request a demo and we'll trace a QET-ELEC retirement against a documented Scope 2 market-based claim — temporal matching, geographic deliverability, and the framework-aligned exports flowing into your ESG software.
The Integrity Architecture: Verification, Enforcement, Irrevocability
For corporate buyers and the auditors and assurance providers who eventually review their Scope 2 disclosures, the integrity of a QET-ELEC retirement record depends on three structural properties operating together.
- ISO 14064-3 reasonable-assurance verification. Every mint requires an unmodified verification opinion under ISO 14064-3:2019 at reasonable-assurance level — the higher of the two assurance levels in the standard. The verifier must be accredited to ISO 14065:2020 by an acceptable accreditation body (ANAB, UKAS, DAkkS, INMETRO, or another International Accreditation Forum signatory). Limited assurance is not sufficient for issuance; reasonable assurance is the operative bar the elevated tiers of the major frameworks now expect.
- Single-mint enforcement at the registry layer. One MWh of generated renewable electricity produces exactly one token. The Hedera-anchored registry structurally rejects any attempt to issue a second token for the same MWh in the same hour — double-counting prevention operating at the infrastructure level, not the policy level. There is no operational pathway by which the same MWh reaches active inventory across multiple registries simultaneously.
- Irrevocable on-chain retirement. When a buyer retires a token against a Scope 2 reporting claim, the closing event is permanent. The Hedera state machine writes the token's status to RETIRED and rejects any subsequent attempt to un-retire, re-trade, or re-use it. The retirement record is queryable, immutable, and traceable back through every transfer to the original mint and the verifier's reasonable-assurance opinion — preserved for the seven-year minimum retention window the Governance Framework requires.
The Attribute Structure: Hourly Granularity and DID Compliance
The attribute structure on each certificate is what makes hourly matching mechanically possible and what makes the data consumable by both human auditors and the autonomous procurement and compliance agents the industry is converging on. The universal attributes on every QET-ELEC:
- Hour-of-generation timestamp. Explicit ISO 8601 timestamp at the hourly grain. A 2026-04-15T14:00:00Z token represents 1 MWh generated in that specific hour, not an annual average.
- Generator location and grid region. The renewable generator's coordinates and the grid region (NERC sub-region, ISO/RTO balancing authority, or analogous national grid identifier). The geographic-deliverability test runs against this attribute.
- Generation technology and project identifier. Wind, solar (utility-scale or distributed), hydro, geothermal, biomass, storage-paired (with the storage-paired methodology applied for round-trip and dispatch attribution where relevant), and the project's registration ID.
- Vintage and reporting period. Generation year and (where available) generation quarter/month, with the temporal-matching test running against this attribute.
- Verifier of record. The accredited ISO 14065:2020 verifier whose reasonable-assurance opinion underwrote the mint, lead verifier credentials, opinion date, and materiality threshold applied.
- DID-compliant identifier. A W3C-aligned Decentralized Identifier on the token, making it machine-readable and consumable by autonomous procurement and compliance agents at scale.
Built for Autonomous Consumption
The trajectory of corporate compliance is toward autonomous data consumption — ESG software platforms, compliance bots, and increasingly agentic AI runtimes that consume registry-grade attribute data without human-in-the-loop intervention. Certificates that lack DID-compliant structure cannot be reliably consumed by those systems; certificates that have it become native inputs to automated decision-making.
For the Machine-Ready API surface and agentic-consumption contextCross-Framework Alignment for the Disclosure Cycle
A QET-ELEC retirement does not produce one disclosure output — it produces the framework-aligned exports the buyer's program needs across every reporting regime simultaneously. The same retirement event populates the relevant lines in:
- GHG Protocol Scope 2 market-based. The market-based Scope 2 disclosure line uses the retirement's verified attribute (zero-carbon for renewable generation; specific kgCO₂e per MWh emission factor where the methodology applies). The Quality Criteria tests are satisfied at the transaction level rather than reconciled later.
- SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard. Power-sector and cross-sector SBTi targets that incorporate Scope 2 reduction trajectories consume QET-ELEC retirements as supporting documentation. The retirement record carries the methodology, verifier, and hourly attribute the framework increasingly anticipates.
- CSRD ESRS E1. The EU corporate disclosure standard for climate change requires structured Scope 2 disclosure including the market-based instrument's quality attributes. Retirements populate the ESRS E1 payload with the underlying verification and chain-of-custody references the EU assurance engagement requires.
- IFRS S2 climate-related disclosures. The standard's assurance trajectory expects reasonable-assurance documentation for material climate-related disclosures including Scope 2. ISO 14064-3 reasonable assurance underlying the retirement satisfies that bar.
- California SB 253 and TCR. Both regimes accept QET-backed Scope 2 disclosures, with the retirement record serving as supporting evidence at the elevated assurance tiers their phased schedules require.
A single retirement event produces framework-aligned outputs across all of these regimes simultaneously. The buyer's ESG software (Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep, Workiva, or in-house GHG accounting) consumes the same Machine-Ready API payload across every disclosure cycle.
EnergyTag, 24/7 CFE, and the EU GoO Context
Three industry initiatives shape the operational vocabulary of hourly-matched renewable electricity procurement. Understanding how QET-ELEC interoperates with each is the practical fluency procurement teams need.
- EnergyTag. The EnergyTag standard establishes the technical specification for hourly granular certificates of energy ownership (Granular Certificates) — the underlying framework for hourly-matched renewable claims globally. QET-ELEC's hourly timestamping, generator-location attribution, and unique-instrument enforcement align directly to the EnergyTag specification. Where a buyer's program has committed to EnergyTag-aligned procurement, the QET-ELEC documentation produces the structure the standard expects.
- 24/7 carbon-free electricity (CFE) programs. The 24/7 CFE framework, championed by the Clean Energy Buyers Association and adopted by major corporate programs, targets hourly matching of consumption against carbon-free generation across the buyer's full load. QET-ELEC's hourly-granularity attribute structure is the building block 24/7 CFE programs assemble into portfolio-level matching workflows. The product is one of several registry-grade options 24/7 CFE programs can consume; the consumption pattern itself is framework-defined, not Greentruth-specific.
- EU Guarantees of Origin (GoO) and the European market context. In the EU, the Guarantees of Origin framework under RED III provides the operative regulatory backbone for renewable electricity attribution. EU GoO certificates and QET-ELEC are not interchangeable — GoO is a regulated cross-border attribution instrument, while QET-ELEC is a registry-grade EAC anchored under ISO 14064-3 reasonable-assurance verification. For buyers with EU exposure, the two work as complementary instruments: GoO satisfies the EU regulatory framework where it applies, and QET-ELEC provides the elevated-integrity Scope 2 documentation for the CSRD ESRS E1 and global corporate disclosure cycles.
Where QET-ELEC Sits in the QET Family Portfolio
QET-ELEC is not a standalone product line; it sits within the cross-token portfolio that defines the Greentruth Marketplace. For corporate procurement programs running across electricity, gas, RNG, and (at the long-term target year) residual neutralization, that integration matters operationally.
QET-ELEC — hourly-matched renewable electricity attribution under Scope 2 market-based (this page).
QET-NG — verified low-CI natural gas, addressing Scope 3 Category 3 upstream-fuel disclosure with primary-data quality.
QET-RNG — renewable natural gas substitution with full Compliance Passport five-point physical-delivery verification, supporting Scope 1 fossil-CO₂ reduction.
QET-Ethanol — low-CI ethanol in liquid-fuel applications, supporting LCFS pathway compliance and EU RED III chain of custody.
QET-SOL — negative-CI solid-fuel thermal energy from waste-stream feedstocks, designed for offset pairing with positive-CI QETs to net out residual Scope 1 and Scope 3.
QET-CCS — residual neutralization through geologically stored CO₂ at the long-term net-zero target year.
The cross-token integration is what lets a corporate sustainability program run a single procurement workflow across the full mitigation hierarchy without operating parallel verification stacks, parallel registries, or parallel disclosure cycles. Every retirement, regardless of token class, produces the same framework-aligned exports through the same Machine-Ready API.
For the abatement-first / neutralization-at-residuals framing
What QET-ELEC Is NOT
A few important boundaries to surface directly — these matter because Scope 2 market-based claims are where corporate disclosure most often gets caught under tightening assurance review.
- Not an annual-matching REC. While the product can technically be retired against an annual reporting period, the hourly-granularity attribute structure is designed for hourly-matching workflows. Using QET-ELEC inventory at the annual-matching level forfeits the documentation advantage that justifies the certificate's existence.
- Not interchangeable with EU Guarantees of Origin. EU GoO is a regulated cross-border attribution instrument under RED III. QET-ELEC is a registry-grade EAC anchored under ISO 14064-3 reasonable assurance. The two work as complementary instruments for buyers with EU exposure; they are not substitutes for each other.
- Not satisfied by limited-assurance verification. Scope 2 disclosure under the elevated tiers of GHG Protocol Quality Criteria, SBTi power-sector targets, CSRD ESRS E1, IFRS S2, SB 253, and TCR expects reasonable-assurance verification under ISO 14064-3. Limited assurance is not sufficient.
- Not the same as the QET-ELEC Core Concept methodology page. This product page is the buyer's view — procurement decision, audience, framework alignment, regulatory environment. The methodology page is the SEO/GEO explainer documenting how the product works mechanically.
- Not a guarantee of grid-level decarbonization. Retiring a QET-ELEC against a Scope 2 market-based claim is a contractual instrument conveying the verified renewable attribute. It does not, on its own, decarbonize the grid the buyer physically consumes from. The market-based Scope 2 disclosure documents the buyer's renewable-procurement commitment; the location-based Scope 2 disclosure (which remains required as a parallel line) tells the grid-emissions story.
Frequently Asked Questions
One MWh of renewable electricity with explicit hourly generation timestamp, generator location and grid region, and generation technology, anchored under ISO 14064-3 reasonable-assurance verification by an accredited ISO 14065:2020 verifier. The token carries a W3C-aligned DID-compliant identifier and the verifier of record as immutable on-chain metadata.
Request a Demo
See QET-ELEC in Operation
Request a demo and we'll walk a live QET-ELEC flow end to end — verification, mint, acquisition, retirement, and the framework-aligned Scope 2 exports your reporting team will file.