Power purchase agreements (PPAs), renewable energy certificates (RECs), and guarantees of origin (GOs) may be used to make “market-based” adjustments to the total emissions from your electricity consumption.

The Change Climate Project requires that vintages of any Energy Attribute Certificates used for compliance be purchased within the certification year or one year prior. All RECs and GOs used for compliance must also take place on the same grid subregion as your Scope 2 electricity consumption. If there is a question about the eligibility of renewable energy instruments in the case of your pending certification, Change Climate will reference the GHG Protocol guidance.

Companies should refer to grid "subregions" (see the map below) when making market-based adjustments to Scope 2 electricity emission calculations. This essentially means that in order for a REC to qualify to zero out emissions from electricity consumption, it must be generated from a project that displaces electricity of equal or greater emissions intensity as the electricity you consume.

The Change Climate Project defers to eGRID subregions in the US because they are a closer reflection of actual electricity balancing areas - the markets in which generators serve load. While it's technically true that North America is all one big grid, significant transmission constraints prevent the perfect flow of electrons across all of it equally, so grid emissions from, for example, New England end up being very different from those in the Southeast, Northwest, etc.