Today we’re joined by Christopher Hailstone, a leading expert in clean energy markets, to discuss a critical but often overlooked piece of infrastructure: the renewable energy certificate registries. As federal policies shift, voluntary corporate demand has become the indispensable engine for clean energy growth. We’ll explore an impending shake-up in the Western U.S. with the WREGIS registry, examining the potential for market disruption, the challenges for companies pursuing next-generation clean technologies, and what this all means for the credibility of corporate climate claims. The conversation will unpack the risks of rebuilding this essential system from scratch and the costs of a fragmented market, ultimately asking what a better path forward could look like.
With federal policies shifting, voluntary corporate demand is a key driver for clean energy. How might the uncertainty and potential service disruptions from a multi-year WREGIS software rebuild specifically impact corporate investment decisions and the pace of new project development in the West? Please elaborate.
It’s a massive concern, and frankly, it injects a level of risk that this market simply cannot afford right now. When a corporation is considering a multi-million-dollar, long-term power purchase agreement, certainty is everything. A multi-year software rebuild is the opposite of that. It hangs a giant question mark over the fundamental mechanism that validates their purchase. We saw a preview of this in 2023 during their last software transition; some users were unable to issue RECs for months. Imagine you’re a corporate buyer who has made a public commitment, and suddenly the very instruments you need to prove it are stuck in administrative limbo. That kind of operational failure creates a chilling effect that ripples all the way back to project financing and development.
The new WREGIS may initially only offer “minimum viable products” for state compliance markets. What are the practical challenges and market barriers this creates for companies looking to transact in emerging assets like clean hydrogen, SAF, or nuclear energy through the voluntary market?
This is where the plan moves from being risky to being actively detrimental to innovation. A “minimum viable product” focused on legacy compliance markets essentially tells the most forward-thinking companies that the West is not open for their business. If you’re a company looking to pioneer a green hydrogen offtake agreement or support a next-generation nuclear project, you need a registry that can create and track those specific energy attributes. Without that infrastructure, the transaction has no currency in the voluntary market. It creates an immediate barrier; you can’t sell or claim what you can’t officially track. This forces innovators to either look to other regions with more advanced registries or to abandon these cutting-edge projects altogether, leaving the market stuck in the past.
Upcoming changes to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol will likely demand more granular data on energy attributes. If the new WREGIS registry is not built to provide time-and-location-specific instruments, how will this affect a company’s ability to make credible, high-impact decarbonization claims?
It fundamentally undermines their credibility. The entire conversation around corporate decarbonization is shifting from simply buying a volume of RECs to match annual consumption, to demonstrably powering operations with clean energy on an hour-by-hour basis. The proposed GHGP changes reflect this push for greater impact and transparency. If your registry can’t issue a time-and-location-stamped certificate, you can’t prove you were using clean energy during a specific high-emissions hour on the grid. Your claim to be “100% renewable” starts to look flimsy, opening you up to accusations of greenwashing. Companies are investing heavily to make high-impact claims, and a registry that can only offer yesterday’s tools makes that investment impossible to verify.
While innovative registries like CleanCounts exist, using multiple systems adds complexity. Could you walk through the specific cost and operational burdens a company might face when forced to use a legacy system for compliance and a separate, modern registry for its voluntary clean energy purchases?
It creates a logistical and financial nightmare. On a practical level, you’re doubling your workload. Your energy and sustainability teams now have to learn, manage, and reconcile data across two entirely different platforms, each with its own interface, reporting standards, and fee structures. This means double the administrative fees, double the training hours, and a significant increase in the potential for human error when transferring or matching data. It drains resources that should be going toward new clean energy projects and instead funnels them into redundant administrative overhead. For a market that is already navigating tight margins, this added friction is a significant, and completely unnecessary, burden.
You’ve noted that stakeholders should insist on a better path forward. What concrete steps should corporate buyers and regulators take to influence the WREGIS transition, and what would an ideal outcome that ensures both market continuity and future innovation look like?
The stakeholders—especially the corporate buyers who account for over a third of all wind and solar development—hold immense power here. They need to move from being passive users to active advocates. This means formally engaging with WECC and with state regulators, using their collective voice to demand a clear transition plan that avoids service gaps and, crucially, includes a detailed roadmap for supporting next-generation attributes. An ideal outcome isn’t to halt the spin-off, but to guide it. It would involve a transition to a proven, modern software platform—perhaps through partnership rather than a rebuild from scratch—that can seamlessly serve both existing state compliance needs and the dynamic, evolving demands of the voluntary market in a single, unified system.
What is your forecast for the Western voluntary clean energy market over the next five years if the WREGIS transition proceeds as currently planned?
If the transition continues on its current trajectory, my forecast is unfortunately quite grim. I see a period of stagnation and fragmentation for the Western voluntary market. The uncertainty and risk will likely cause a slowdown in new corporate PPAs, as buyers hesitate to commit to long-term deals on such shaky infrastructure. We’ll see a ‘bifurcation,’ where sophisticated buyers who need granular, high-impact instruments will be forced to use secondary registries, adding cost and complexity, while the primary WREGIS system languishes, serving only basic compliance needs. The West, which has been a leader, risks becoming a laggard, losing investment and innovation to other regions in the country that provide a more stable, forward-looking market infrastructure.
