<![CDATA[Energy Web - Medium]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/proxy/1*TGH72Nnw24QL3iV9IOm4VA.png Energy Web - Medium https://medium.com/energy-web-insights?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 Medium Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:13:16 GMT <![CDATA[What It Would Take to Cut the Soft Costs of Climate Action: New Digital Infrastructure for…]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/what-it-would-take-to-cut-the-soft-costs-of-climate-action-new-digital-infrastructure-for-2ef67f80a6ae?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/2ef67f80a6ae Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:03:34 GMT 2026-10-07T22:03:36.091Z What It Would Take to Cut the Soft Costs of Climate Action: New Digital Infrastructure for Sustainability Markets

We made the case in our recent posts that sustainability market rules carry a soft cost that has little to do with decarbonization itself and that these soft costs harm rule takers and rule makers alike. Corporates, their advisory firms, and their assurance providers lose budget and staff capacity that would otherwise go to procurement, investment, and deployment. Rule makers lose adoption, consistency, and trust in the very claims their rules were written to produce.

Zoom in from that market-level view to the operational level — where a sustainability team, a consultant, or a carbon accounting software platform actually does the work day to day — and these soft costs create eight specific pains:

The eight pains behind climate action soft costs

1. Company data starts out unusable. The inputs to any sustainability calculation, PDFs, spreadsheets, ERP exports, invoices, supplier questionnaires, arrive with missing units and inconsistent classifications. Every team, advisor, or platform has to clean and structure this data before any rule can even be applied to it, and every one of them does this separately, for the same underlying facts.

2. Value chain (Scope 3) data collection is brutal. Supplier chasing, customer product use data, substitutions, allocation methods, and missing product carbon footprints turn what should be a data lookup into a high-touch, services-heavy engagement. Industry analysts point to inconsistent supplier methodologies and limited primary data availability as the core, persistent barriers to closing this gap (Sphera, 2025), which is exactly why supplier survey fatigue keeps compounding across every company sending near-identical questionnaires separately (Assent, 2026).

3. Methodology maintenance never ends. Standards, regulations, guidance, and reference data change on a rolling basis, such as SBTi’s new V2.0 Corporate Net-Zero Standard. Every rule taker, advisor, and platform has to track those changes and re-implement them independently, which is a permanent expert and engineering cost with no natural end point.

4. Every calculation output needs defensibility. “Why did you calculate this number this way?” is a routine question from auditors, investors, and increasingly courts, given the rise in climate-washing litigation covered in the first post in this series. Answering it well requires being able to show the full path from data to result, which most teams currently cannot do without reconstructing the calculation from scratch. It also requires providing evidence to back any claim about emission reductions.

5. Emission factors and reference data are a mess. Finding, licensing, selecting, mapping, and keeping current the right emission factor for a given calculation is its own specialized task, and it is one that gets duplicated across nearly every company and platform independently. A single-user license for one widely used international database alone costs several hundred euros a year, with enterprise and developer licenses considerably higher, and that is before mapping it against the other reference databases most calculations also need (Carbonly.ai, 2026).

6. Assurance happens too late to be efficient. By the time an auditor shows up asking for evidence that was assembled months earlier, that evidence is often scattered across teams, formats, and people who have since moved on to other work. This is precisely the kind of friction that professional bodies have already flagged as a capacity risk on the assurance side (Accounting Times, 2024).

7. The lack of framework interoperability creates a repeated tax. The same underlying fact, an emissions reduction, a clean energy purchase, a supplier engagement, has to be manually re-expressed in CSRD and ESRS terms, then ISSB terms, then a GHG inventory format, then a CDP response, then SBTi progress reporting, then a customer’s own questionnaire. Every company and every platform serving them repeats this mapping work independently, as the second and third posts in this series both described in detail.

8. It is getting harder to tell a credible claim from a confident one. Nearly every platform and report now describes itself as audit-ready, verified, or science-based. Rule takers, investors, and rule makers have no easy, consistent way to tell which of those claims actually rest on defensible evidence and which are simply well marketed, which is exactly the dynamic behind general corporate greenwashing and greenhushing patterns and the finding that only 7 percent of corporate net-zero targets meet minimum integrity criteria today (NewClimate Institute, 2025).

None of these eight pains is really a data problem, a software problem, or a talent problem on its own. Every one of them is a symptom of the same missing piece: there is no shared, neutral, accessible infrastructure that translates a rule once, calculates evidence against that consistently, checks claims without redoing the work, and can reapply the same evidence to relevant elements of other rules while avoiding duplicative work. That missing piece has a shape, and it includes three layers.

Layer 1: Rules infrastructure

Every sustainability market rule, whether a mandatory disclosure regulation, a voluntary standard, or a certification scheme, exists as a document, a PDF, a webpage, a technical annex. Software cannot consume a document. It can only consume logic, and today that logic gets rebuilt, independently and inconsistently, by every rule taker, advisor, and platform that touches the rule.

The first layer of infrastructure turns a rule from a static document into something software can actually run:

  • versioned, so everyone knows which edition of a rule produced a given result;
  • executable, so the calculation logic itself, not just a description of it, is shared;
  • testable, so a change to the rule can be verified before it goes live; and
  • referenced, so every downstream calculation can point back to the exact source and version of the rule it used.

This rules infrastructure layer can tackle pain points 3, 6, and 7 above. This is because methodology maintenance stops being a cost every organization pays separately, emission factors get resolved once against a shared, versioned reference rather than re-licensed and re-mapped by everyone independently, and framework interoperability becomes a matter of tracing shared logic across standards rather than manually re-deriving the same fact many different ways.

Layer 2: Trust infrastructure

Even a perfectly digitized rule does not, by itself, make a result trustworthy. A number is only as credible as the path that produced it, and today that path is rarely preserved anywhere a third party can check.

The second layer of improved sustainability market digital infrastructure preserves that entire path for every result: the underlying data, the transformations applied to it, the emission factors or reference data used, the specific version of the rule that was applied, the calculation itself, and the final output, all linked together rather than scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and people’s memories.

This trust infrastructure layer resolves pain points 1, 4, and 5 above. Company data still has to be cleaned and structured, but the transformation from raw input to structured fact becomes part of a traceable record rather than a one-time, disposable step. Every calculation can defend itself, because the full chain behind it is preserved rather than reconstructed under pressure. And assurance no longer has to start from evidence assembled months ago, because the evidence was captured as a byproduct of doing the calculation in the first place, not as a separate exercise after the fact.

Layer 3: Assurance infrastructure

The third layer is where the external ecosystem of carbon accounting and sustainability software platforms, consultants, and assurance providers actually operates. It is also the layer most exposed to the missing elements that the first and second layers above solve.

Today, a typical assurance workflow runs roughly like this: a company enters data into an ESG SaaS platform, exports it to spreadsheets, hands those spreadsheets to a consultant, who prepares a report for an auditor, who comes back with questions, which get routed back through the SaaS platform to the customer, who has to go find more evidence, which then goes back to the auditor. Every hop in that loop is a place where time, money, and confidence leak out. This is exactly why assurance capacity is becoming a genuine bottleneck on how fast sustainability rules can be adopted.

Assurance infrastructure stands to gain from common, neutral rules and trust infrastructure. This infrastructure would create a new reality where a company could simply enter data into a given SaaS platform, have it produce a computational receipt, and have this receipt go directly to their assurance provider. Instead of redoing the work to check the claims, the auditor simply inspects the receipt: what data was used, which version of which rule ran, what assumptions were made along the way, what evidence supports the inputs, which controls passed, and what exceptions remain open. None of that requires the auditor to trust a given platform’s word. It requires the platform to hand over a record that is checkable on its own terms.

That shift is what would make assurance scalable rather than a fixed, linear cost per client. An auditor who can review a receipt in a fraction of the time it takes to reconstruct a calculation from scratch can serve more clients without lowering the bar on rigor, which lowers the cost of assurance for the auditor and, in turn, for every corporate client on the other end of that engagement.

Why this matters to both sides of every rule, again

Put the three layers together and the eight pains resolve in the same order they compound today. Rules infrastructure gives rule makers something they do not currently have: real, shared visibility into how a rule is actually being interpreted and used, without having to chase it down organization by organization. Trust infrastructure gives rule takers and their advisors a way to make and defend a claim without rebuilding the underlying proof every time someone asks a question. Assurance infrastructure gives assurance providers a way to serve more of the growing corporate sustainability market without either lowering quality or raising price.

None of the eight pains above gets solved by asking rule takers to work harder, or rule makers to write clearer rules, or auditors to hire faster than the market allows. They get solved by building the shared, neutral, accessible infrastructure supporting all of these stakeholders. This is the way to cut the soft costs of climate action and maximize global procurement, investments, and deployment in decarbonization.

Sources

What It Would Take to Cut the Soft Costs of Climate Action: New Digital Infrastructure for… was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[What We Heard at Climate Week New York: Cutting Climate “Soft Costs” Starts With the Organizations…]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/what-we-heard-at-climate-week-new-york-cutting-climate-soft-costs-starts-with-the-organizations-660de5ca8c7d?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/660de5ca8c7d Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:02:52 GMT 2026-10-07T22:02:53.982Z What We Heard at Climate Week New York: Cutting Climate “Soft Costs” Starts With the Organizations That Write the Rules

Last week, the Energy Web team spent Climate Week New York (CWNY) in dozens of meetings, panels, and working sessions with rule makers (the organizations that author and maintain sustainability market rules) and rule takers (the corporations, advisory firms, and SaaS platforms, that apply these rules for sustainability-related reporting, assurance, and claims). We arrived with a thesis that has taken shape over recent months: that the biggest drag on corporate climate action often has nothing to do with the physical cost of clean energy, carbon credits, and other sustainability solutions. Instead, it is the hidden yet fast-growing soft cost of proving that a claim adheres to one or more relevant rules.

We left CWNY with this thesis confirmed and sharpened. Some of the most useful conversations of the week came from a roundtable we hosted with a group of rule makers: the standards bodies, certification programs, and registries whose rules shape how companies buy, report, and claim their climate action. Participants spoke candidly about where soft costs come from, what worries them about digitizing their rules, and what would make shared infrastructure worth their time.

This post summarizes what we heard and what it means for how shared digital infrastructure for sustainability markets should be built and brought to market.

The soft costs are real, and rule makers feel them too

Across CWNY, the pain points we heard lined up closely with our prior research on the eight pains behind climate action soft costs. What stood out was who raised them: rule makers, not just rule takers, described the same friction from the other side of the rule.

  • Every rule gets interpreted in many ways. Each rule taker builds its own interpretation of the same rule, and a mix of public and private, documented and undocumented protocols makes consistency of interpretation even harder.
  • Organizations keep rebuilding the same infrastructure. Registries and reporting systems duplicate one another and rarely interoperate, so the same fact gets entered and checked again in each system to ensure avoidance of double issuance and double claims.
  • Good data is hard to get and hard to share. Reliable asset- and product-level data remains scarce, and concerns about data security and access slow down the sharing that does happen.
  • Rules, registries, and reporting systems operate in silos, despite their interconnectedness. Coordination across rule maker systems, registries, and reporting systems remains limited and largely ad-hoc.
  • Rules connect across value chains, but systems do not. A corporate buyer’s purchasing conditions, a supplier’s certification, and a project developer’s issuance standard all depend on one another, yet each runs on its own logic — despite often overlapping use of the same rules.
  • Incentives rarely line up. Every rule maker has good reasons to protect its own process, rule takers use their own internal and external reporting systems, which slows coordination even when everyone agrees on this collective action problem.

Conversations at CWNY thus further clarified how climate action soft costs stem from an interoperability gap across rules, registries, and SaaS platforms. They also confirmed the three layers necessary for new digital infrastructure for global sustainability markets: rules infrastructure that turns a rule into logic software can run, trust infrastructure that preserves the path from data to claim, and assurance infrastructure that lets a third party check a result without redoing the work.

Across several panels and conversations at CWNY, we also heard that the challenge is becoming more complex as sustainability software expands beyond carbon accounting into Product Environmental Footprints and other multi-impact assessments. More impact categories bring more methodologies, datasets, emission factors, dependencies, and version changes for software providers to manage. At the same time, AI is increasingly being introduced into sustainability workflows, including to help select methodologies, factors, and assumptions. This raises a new question for corporates, platforms, and assurance providers: how can they reliably understand and verify how a calculation or result was produced? These discussions pointed to a need for infrastructure that connects rules, data, computation, and evidence, rather than treating each as a separate problem.

What rule makers told us about digitizing their rules

There are various user requirements for rule makers to engage deeply with digital rules infrastructure, including:

Trust and ownership come first. A rule maker’s brand, process, and intellectual property are its most valuable assets. Any infrastructure that represents a rule digitally has to show that it will not dilute, distort, or misrepresent the standard behind it. For many rule makers, this concern outweighs any potential efficiency gain and must be clarified upfront.

Rule makers have little visibility into how their rules get used. Today, a protocol or standards body publishes a rule and then largely loses sight of its wider adoption. It cannot easily see who applies the rule, how they interpret it, or what real-world impact it drives. Infrastructure that gives rule makers that visibility, and a way to measure adoption and outcomes, offers a compelling benefit.

Value created downstream should reach the rule maker. When companies, SaaS platforms, and other rule makers build on a given rule, the organization that owns and maintains it rarely shares in the value it helps create. Rule makers responded strongly to the idea that shared infrastructure could change that, including by opening potential new revenue as their rules get used downstream.

Rules need a shared language. Participants wanted a common way to differentiate across rules, certifications, and best practices, and a way to translate between the different vocabularies each rule set uses. They also saw a role for AI in speeding up the work of turning rule documents into structured, machine-readable digital form.

More rules need to be open. Infrastructure development depends on access. When parts of a rule sit behind membership or paid-access walls, software cannot read it, platforms cannot connect it to related rules, and third parties cannot check how someone applied it. Opening more rules to public access is a precondition for making them machine-readable and interoperable.

Rule makers want the final word on their own rules

One message came through clearly: rule makers want to be the authority that confirms a digital version of their rule reflects what the rule actually means. They do not want a third party, including an assurance provider, attesting for that interpretation on their behalf. That role belongs to the organization that wrote the rule.

This has a practical design implication. Shared infrastructure should let a rule maker review and sign off on the digital version of its rule, and it should record openly who confirmed a given interpretation and how. When that record travels with the rule, everyone downstream (corporates, platforms, and auditors alike) can see how much weight to give it.

It also clarifies roles across infrastructure layers: rule makers own the meaning of a rule, whereas assurance providers check whether a specific claim applied that rule correctly. Keeping those roles distinct protects the credibility of both.

Rule makers and rule takers have different needs from new infrastructure

Shared infrastructure matters to both sides — the rule maker and rule takers — of every rule. CWNY reinforced that point, but added an important caveat: different benefits of new infrastructure resonate both among and across rule makers and rule takers.

Rule takers want clarity and efficiency; rule makers want integrity and reach. Corporates, their advisors, and their SaaS platforms care most about lowering the cost and effort of making a defensible sustainability claim. Rule makers care most about accurate interpretation, consistent adoption, and visibility into impact. The same infrastructure can serve both, but the business case sounds different to each.

No two rule makers want exactly the same thing. A rule maker’s business model and its posture toward openness shape what it values. An organization funded by membership or certification fees weighs openness differently than one whose mission depends on the widest possible (free) adoption. Engagement has to start from each rule maker’s own model, not from a single script.

Where a rule sits in the value chain changes its value. Climate markets run roughly from certifying a climate solution, to issuing an instrument such as an energy attribute certificate or carbon credit, to using that instrument in a claim. Rules at the supply end benefit from infrastructure that proves the integrity of what they certify and tracks where it goes. Rules at the claim end, which govern what companies can say, benefit from consistent, checkable application across the many companies that report against them. Each needs its own value proposition.

Reporting rules offer the easiest starting point. Corporate and investor reporting rules, such as greenhouse gas accounting and disclosure standards, tend to be fully public. Many certification schemes, however, keep parts of their rules behind membership or paid-access walls. Public reporting rules carry less friction to digitize and confirm, which makes them a natural first step, with certification schemes likely following as later adopters.

Start where rules and claims connect most. Participants pointed to emerging markets and solution spaces — such as Scope 3 reporting, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), super pollutants, and carbon dioxide removal — as early areas where shared infrastructure could prove its value quickly. These rule-related green spaces offer opportunities to develop innovative solutions that can then be expanded into established sustainability markets.

An opportunity for rule makers (and rule takers) to engage

CWNY reinforced our view that the growing soft costs of climate action are becoming a material challenge, and one that no single organization can solve alone. Addressing this collective-action problem requires collaboration across the ecosystem. It also sharpened our understanding of how shared, neutral market infrastructure can reduce friction for both rule makers and rule takers, while strengthening trust in sustainability calculations, reporting, and claims.

Rule-maker participation is critical to making this infrastructure credible and scalable. Energy Web is therefore engaging with standards bodies and other rule makers to gather input, establish partnerships, and accelerate the development of shared digital rules infrastructure for sustainability markets. In parallel, we are working with sustainability and climate SaaS platforms to develop, test, and refine the trust and assurance components needed to put that infrastructure into practice.

If you are a rule maker or a rule taker and want to help shape this infrastructure, we want to hear from you. Please contact Energy Web at commercial@energyweb.org to learn more.

What We Heard at Climate Week New York: Cutting Climate “Soft Costs” Starts With the Organizations… was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Rule Makers Wrote the Rules to Move Money. Soft Costs Are Getting in the Way.]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/rule-makers-wrote-the-rules-to-move-money-soft-costs-are-getting-in-the-way-94727b061e44?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/94727b061e44 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:02:28 GMT 2026-09-15T14:04:12.261Z

Every climate standard, disclosure regulation, and certification scheme ultimately exists to do one thing: incentivize new corporate decision making that supports global greenhouse emission reductions. These rule makers — such as a standards body, policymaker, certification framework, or the methodology team behind any of them, writes a rule so that more capital flows toward decarbonization and less flows toward business as usual. Collectively, rule makers in effect force companies to manage their emissions by requiring their measurement and reporting.

The collective mission of rule makers is being quietly undermined by costs resulting from fragmentation, inconsistency, and redundancy. The soft cost of translating, reconciling, and verifying compliance with climate rules, distinct from the cost of the decarbonization those rules are meant to drive, is large enough to divert real budget and staff time away from procurement, investment, and deployment decisions. The scale of what is at stake makes this worth taking seriously: the current average annual climate finance gap between current versus needed investment amounts to nearly $6 trillion (Climate Policy Initiative and A&O Shearman, 2025). Every hour a company spends reconciling one rule’s requirements against another’s is an hour not spent closing that gap.

Rule makers are starting to recognize this problem.

Rule makers have started to acknowledge the fragmentation problem

The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), one of the most widely adopted corporate climate standards in the world, used its own 2026–2030 strategy to name fragmentation as a problem it now has to actively manage. The strategy commits SBTi to “strengthen partnerships and ensure more joined-up approaches” specifically because fragmentation across the standards ecosystem “creates duplication and unnecessary burden for companies” (SBTi, 2026). That is a standards body acknowledging, in its own strategic planning document, that the multiplicity of overlapping rules is now working against the adoption those rules depend on.

This is not only SBTi’s problem. Every one of more than 11,000 companies with validated science-based targets through SBTi is also, in parallel, navigating other voluntary and compliance schemes — from GHG Protocol to CSRD — that were not designed in coordination with SBTi’s rules.

Understanding how rules relate to each other is still mostly manual

Standards increasingly reference or build on one another, but there is no common, neutral mechanism that maps these relationships. As a result, organizations must do their own work to figure out these relationships, with no shortcut but to track it by hand (KEY ESG, 2026). For a rule maker, that means every dependency it has on, or contributes to, another standard has to be explained, re-explained, and manually kept current with every party downstream. This consumes rule maker capacity better spent on the substance of the rule itself and supporting wider adoption of measures to reduce emissions.

Rule changes ripple further than any one rule maker can track

Rule development happens within the siloes of a given rule maker’s walls and governance process. When a rule maker updates its standard or scheme, it has almost no visibility into who is still operating under the old version, who has migrated, or where inconsistent implementation is quietly accumulating. SBTi’s recently published V2.0 of its Corporate Net-Zero Standard (CNZS) includes does not clarify linkages with other rules and has dependencies on not-yet-finalized updates to the separate Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Corporate Standard. Moreover, companies with science-based target commitments or renewals due in 2026 or 2027 have been told to keep using the prior V1.3 CNZS and migrate at their next cycle, rather than switch immediately (ESG Dive, 2026). This means two versions of the same standard will be in active use simultaneously for years, without any shared system that shows which companies are on which version or flags when a validated target no longer reflects current requirements. This creates confusion and real costs.

Adoption itself is hard to see and harder to trust

Even measuring how well a rule has been adopted is a heavy, manual undertaking today, typically requiring an entire dedicated tracking organization. The Net Zero Tracker database, maintained by a consortium of research groups, follows more than 4,000 entities and found that as of September 2025, only 1,935 had net-zero targets at all, with more than 400 of the world’s largest publicly listed companies still carrying no mitigation target whatsoever, concentrated disproportionately in the United States and China (NewClimate Institute, 2025). Among the companies that do set targets, the same tracker found that only 7% met minimum procedural and substantive integrity criteria in 2025 (NewClimate Institute, 2025), only a marginal improvement on the 5% recorded the year before (Trellis, 2024). A rule maker cannot tell, at a glance, whether low integrity reflects weak ambition or simply the difficulty of implementing a rule correctly without shared infrastructure to check against. Those are very different problems requiring very different responses, and today most rule makers cannot easily distinguish between them at scale. This also creates challenges for philanthropic and grant-giving organizations that want to support the work of the most impactful rule makers.

The verification bottleneck threatens to cap corporate adoption

Even a well-designed, well-adopted rule runs into a hard constraint if nobody can verify compliance with it fast enough or consistently. Professional bodies representing Australian accountants have already warned regulators directly that “there are still auditor shortages in financial reporting and the need for more staff and expertise to meet the demand for sustainability assurance will only exacerbate this” (Accounting Times, 2024). Demand for that scarce capacity keeps climbing regardless: 73% of large G20 companies obtained assurance on their sustainability disclosures in 2023, up from 51% just five years earlier (AICPA & CIMA, 2025). A rule maker can write the most rigorous standard in the world, but if there are not enough qualified people to check compliance against it, and no shared way to make that checking faster without lowering the bar or further increasing assurance costs. This assurance capacity and cost can have the effect of capping corporate sustainability ambition and implementation.

What this means for the mission behind the rules

No single standard or standards body is at fault with having caused the current state of siloed global sustainability market rules. It is the product of an ecosystem-level infrastructure gap that every rule maker is currently navigating on its own — one partnership, one interoperability annex, and one tracking database at a time.

A common, neutral, and accessible infrastructure layer, one that digitizes rules and their underlying methodologies so they are comparable across frameworks, and that lets any rule taker demonstrate adherence and make a claim in a consistent way, would not replace any rule maker’s authorship or authority over its own standard. It would instead give every rule maker something none of them currently have on their own: real visibility into how their rule relates to others, how their rule is actually being used, and a more consistent way to enable rule adherence. Such new infrastructure would provide a path toward reducing the soft costs that are currently the biggest drag on the corporate sustainability adoption that underpins the broader purpose of rule makers’ rules.

Sources

Rule Makers Wrote the Rules to Move Money. Soft Costs Are Getting in the Way. was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Corporates Are the World’s Largest Climate Buyer. Soft Costs Are Eating Their Budget]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/corporates-are-the-worlds-largest-climate-buyer-soft-costs-are-eating-their-budget-fe1dfb45e382?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/fe1dfb45e382 Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:18:07 GMT 2026-09-10T12:18:07.793Z

Corporates are the single largest source of demand for climate solutions on the planet. They are the ones writing the checks for clean power purchase agreements, low-carbon materials, energy performance improvements, carbon removal, and decarbonization technology at scale. So it matters that a growing share of the budget and staff time meant for that buying, financing, and deploying is instead being absorbed by the administrative work of reporting and proving compliance with diverse global sustainability market rules.

These soft costs create a non-trivial problem for corporate sustainability. Climate finance flows reached $1.9 trillion in 2023, the most recent full year of data, against an estimated need of $6.2–9.5 trillion a year through 2030 to stay on a net-zero pathway, an average annual shortfall of $5.9 trillion (Climate Policy Initiative and A&O Shearman, 2025). Every hour a sustainability team spends interpreting how to adhere to different rules and reconciling the same climate action-related claim across diverse rules is an hour not spent negotiating a power purchase agreement, designing an energy efficiency solution, or supporting a supplier’s decarbonization plan. Plus, the teams doing this work are shrinking: a GlobeScan and BSR survey found that a quarter of corporate sustainability teams now have just two to five employees, down sharply from 2016, when a quarter had 51 or more, with a third of teams facing budget cuts in 2025 alone (ESG Dive, 2026). These teams are also doing more compliance work rather than sustainability work.

Here is where that time and budget actually goes.

Translating rules from PDFs into action

Every climate standard, whether mandatory or voluntary, starts as a document, a PDF, a technical annex, a webpage. Each company reads these rules independently and builds its own internal interpretation of what it requires, how to evaluate the impact of actions toward targets, and how to calculate actions for reporting. This means the same rule ends up implemented inconsistently from one organization and service provider to the next, audited by hand every time, with no reusable record of what was actually calculated. The cost of translating these rules is growing as companies report to more rules, many of which keep changing, where each rule entails initial setup costs and annual costs associated with preparing internal reporting systems and often hiring external advisors and platforms. For example, consider how companies face an average initial setup costs of €287,000 to build the systems needed to capture the required data for the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), plus recurring annual costs averaging €320,000 (fintech.global, 2024).

Navigating a siloed platform landscape

Most companies are not choosing between reporting frameworks. They are running several at once, on top of several software tools that were not built to talk to each other. A review by proxy advisor ISS found that 90% of the corporations it surveyed already use, or plan to use, more than one system for non-financial disclosure (Convene ESG, 2025). Mapping which of those systems and frameworks actually applies to a given business, in a given jurisdiction, for a given claim, is its own standing job before any data collection even starts.

Reporting the same action under slightly different rules

Frameworks that cover similar ground rarely define the same ground identically. GRI, SASB, and CDP have been deliberately aligned to tackle this problem, and GRI remains the most widely used sustainability reporting framework globally, used by roughly 71% of the world’s largest companies (EnergyCAP, 2026, citing KPMG’s 2024 global survey). But alignment does not mean equivalence. ESRS, the mandatory standard underneath the CSRD, is designed to support interoperability with GRI, IFRS, CDP, and TCFD-derived disclosures rather than duplicate them outright, which still leaves a real mapping exercise for anyone reporting the same emissions reduction, the same renewable energy purchase, the same energy efficiency measure, or the same supplier engagement program across more than one of them.

Keeping up with rules that keep changing

Standards do not stay still. The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) published the final V2.0 of its Corporate Net-Zero Standard (CNZS) in June 2026, creating various changes in how the more than 11,000 companies with validated science-based targets must organize and report progress. The CSRD has also recently changed following the European Union’s Omnibus simplification package, creating costs to understand the new albeit simpler rules. None of this reorganization and recalculation work is optional. It has to happen before a company knows what “counts” and moves its decarbonization strategy forward.

Mapping how rules relate to each other

Sustainability market rules increasingly overlap and reference one another, rather than stand alone (Anthesis Group, 2026). Understanding which standard now sits underneath which, and which one governs when they overlap, is a genuine research exercise, not a quick online search or AI prompt. Industry analysts describe this directly as an interoperability challenge, pointing to cases like CSRD data feeding into the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, or ISSB aligning with the now-retired TCFD, as examples companies have to track by hand (KEY ESG, 2026).

Knowing what evidence counts, and what evidence can be reused

Different rules often demand different proof for what is, in practice, the same underlying climate action. A company that procures 1,000 megawatt-hour of clean energy in a given country has to report this single purchase across multiple frameworks in similar yet different ways.

Companies with deep supply chains feel this evidence-related challenge most acutely. Their suppliers are the ones fielding repetitive requests from their corporate customers, creating fatigue among suppliers to meet similar yet different corporate customer data needs. Procurement teams report that administrative complexity — meaning data collection, interpretation, response tracking, and system management — is the leading obstacle to running an effective supplier decarbonization strategy, ahead of every other barrier (Aprovall, 2026, citing Veridion). Suppliers serving multiple large customers routinely receive near-identical questionnaires, in different formats, from every customer separately, which drags down both response rates and data quality on the very evidence base companies need to make a defensible claim (Assent, 2026). There is no shortage of data, but missing infrastructure to map those data to relevant rules for assurance and reporting.

Building confidence in the claim itself

All of the above ultimately feeds into one outcome: whether a company can stand behind a climate claim with confidence, or whether it hedges and keeps quiet. Neither market failure is good for the company or for fostering broader industry-wide climate action. Litigation challenging corporate climate claims has grown from a handful of cases in 2016 to more than 120 by the end of 2023 (LSE Grantham Research Institute, 2024), which pushes some companies toward overclaiming risk aversion instead of transparency. Others go quiet altogether: South Pole’s Net Zero Report found that in nine of 14 major sectors surveyed, most companies were intentionally decreasing their climate communications, with 88% of environmental services companies pulling back their messaging even though 93% said they were on track to meet their targets (Grist, 2024). Even among companies willing to set formal targets, the independent Net Zero Stocktake found only 7% met minimum integrity criteria in 2025 (NewClimate Institute, 2025), a signal that the underlying claims infrastructure, not the ambition, is what is falling short.

What corporates and their advisors actually need

None of these seven problems is really about ambition. Sustainability leaders, their advisory firms, and their assurance providers are not short on motivation, talent, or resources to get this right. They are short on a shared, neutral place to do the translation once for multiple end points: to map a rule to the actions it governs, calculate against it consistently, reuse evidence across frameworks that ask for details about the same underlying actions, and hand over a claim that regulators, investors, and the public can all check without having to trust a single company’s private interpretation of a static PDF.

This kind of common, accessible infrastructure, open to every corporation regardless of size, sector, or which rules apply to it, is exactly what will help cut climate soft costs and unleash greater investments in real impact: procurement, investments, and deployment.

Sources

Corporates Are the World’s Largest Climate Buyer. Soft Costs Are Eating Their Budget was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[The Hidden Tax on Climate Action]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/the-hidden-tax-on-climate-action-5af3e5cce214?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/5af3e5cce214 Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:17:26 GMT 2026-09-08T10:17:27.482Z

Corporations represent a powerful source of demand for clean energy and climate solutions. But corporate climate action has a cost problem that has nothing to do with the physical cost of solar panels, heat pumps, grid transmission or carbon removal. It is the cost of collecting, structuring, and reporting evidence that shows adherence to a given sustainability market rule and proves a related claim based on that rule.

The proof of climate action represents a fast-growing “soft cost” of climate action. The administrative, assurance, and reporting overhead that underpins the underlying real decarbonization work is not decarbonization. The business-as-usual processes and paperwork that corporate sustainability teams to which must now allocate significant budget and staff capacity.

Not only do these soft costs take budget and staff capacity from procurement, investment, and deployment, they are becoming harder to justify because of low public trust in the integrity of corporate claims. For example, survey analysis by PwC found that, even though most investors claim that sustainability is an important factor in investment decisions, a whopping 94% of investors believe corporate reporting on sustainability performance contains unsupported claims (PwC, 2024).

The challenge at hand: how to reduce this tax on climate action to both increase investments in climate solutions and create trust in public environmental claims.

What climate soft costs actually look like

A 2022 survey by the SustainAbility Institute by ERM found that corporate issuers were already spending an average of more than $530,000 annually on climate-related disclosure activities, split across greenhouse gas analysis and disclosure, climate scenario analysis, and internal climate risk management controls. Institutional investors reported spending nearly $1.4 million a year to collect, analyze, and report the same category of information (ERM, 2022). That was all before most of today’s mandatory regimes existed.

Companies face setup and recurring costs for each compliance and voluntary framework for which they have obligations. Consider the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which represents a more recent example providing a clearer picture of what mandatory disclosure costs in practice. Large companies previously covered by the EU’s Non-Financial Reporting Directive face average one-off setup costs of €287,000 to build the systems needed to capture expanded sustainability data, plus recurring annual costs averaging €320,000, driven largely by verification and reporting activity (fintech.global, 2024).

None of this corporate spend is static either. The CSRD’s own scope has already been renegotiated once, through the EU’s Omnibus simplification package, which narrowed mandatory coverage to companies with more than 1,000 employees and turnover above €450 million, pushed reporting timelines out to 2027 through 2029, and cut the number of required data points roughly in half, from more than 1,100 to an estimated 400 to 500 (Coolset, 2026). Every one of those changes has to be re-absorbed by every company that has already set up its compliance and reporting processes.

The sustainability teams absorbing it are also shrinking, not growing. A recent survey by GlobeScan and BSR found that a quarter of corporate sustainability teams now have just two to five employees, compared with 2016, when a quarter of teams had 51 or more. A third of respondents said their budgets fell in 2025, and a quarter expect further cuts in the year ahead, even as compliance and reporting requirements become the top driver of the team’s remaining time (ESG Dive, 2026).

Where the cost actually comes from

The soft cost of corporate climate action is not really a reporting problem. It is an interoperability problem.

Every climate and sustainability rule, whether it is a mandatory disclosure regime, a voluntary standard, or a certification scheme, starts life as a document, a PDF, a webpage, or a technical annex. Every organization that has to comply with a rule, or verify compliance with it, reads the relevant technical guidance and builds its own private interpretation of what it means and how to calculate against it. A proxy-advisory review by ISS found that nearly 90% of the corporations it surveyed were already using, or planning to use, more than one system for non-financial disclosure (Convene ESG, 2025), each with its own private implementation of overlapping rules.

That siloing and inconsistency of these rules is where the cost multiplies. The same rule gets implemented slightly differently by every company, every platform, and every registry that touches it. Nobody holds a shared, reusable record of what was actually calculated, so every audit and every verification starts at square one. On the assurance side, this is now colliding with a hard capacity constraint. For example, the professional bodies representing Australian accountants have warned regulators directly that “there are still auditor shortages in financial reporting and the need for more staff and expertise to meet the demand for sustainability assurance will only exacerbate this” (Accounting Times, 2024). In the United States, engineering, consulting, and other non-accounting firms already perform roughly 80% of sustainability assurance for S&P 500 companies, a level of practice fragmentation that financial auditing does not tolerate (Oxford Law Blogs, 2026). Demand keeps climbing anyway: 73% of large G20 companies obtained assurance on their sustainability disclosures in 2023, up from 69% the year before and just 51% five years earlier (AICPA & CIMA, 2025).

A live example: corporates are actively navigating SBTi’s recent changes

It can take at least a year for sustainability teams to learn and integrate new rules across a company (Trellis, 2026). The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) published the final V2.0 of its Corporate Net-Zero Standard (CNZS) in June 2026. It will take effect 1 February 2027. The V2.0 CNZS replaces the previous four-stage validation cycle with a simplified two-stage model, changes how Scope 3 targets are structured, and removes the exclusion that previously let companies leave 5% of their emissions inventory out of scope entirely (Quantis, 2026; Watershed, 2026). It also makes location-based accounting required, market-based accounting optional, expands recognition of environmental attribute certificates, and introduces a variety of new options for companies to reduce their Scope 3 emissions and decarbonize shared activity pools.

This single revision to one rule now has to be re-absorbed by the more than 11,000 companies that have already validated their science-based targets, each of which has to work out what changed, whether its existing target still qualifies, and how to recalculate and re-report if it does not. There is no shared mechanism that will help companies navigate these changes, map the changes against their science-based targets, or indicate the new evidence they may need to provide to verify their claims. Every company, every consultant, every platform, and every assurance provider does that translation work separately, in parallel, using the same PDF from SBTi’s website.

The infrastructure gap behind greenwashing and greenhushing

The absence of a common, neutral way to make and check a climate claim does not just raise costs. It creates two market failures — greenwashing and greenhushing — both of which erode trust in climate action overall.

On one side, claims outrun the evidence behind them. Greenwashing litigation surged from a handful of cases in 2016 to more than 120 globally by the end of 2023 (LSE Grantham Research Institute, 2024), including 31 new cases specifically challenging misleading claims about environmental performance or emissions reductions in which more than 65% of which have been decided in the claimant’s favor (Pinsent Masons, 2026). Separately, the watchdog TINA.org has tracked more than 150 greenwashing class-action lawsuits in the United States since 2015, with filings more than doubling between 2019 and 2020 and continuing to climb most years since (TINA.org, 2025).

On the other side, companies have more often than not stopped proactively talking about their sustainability commitments and progress toward them, a phenomenon called greenhushing. South Pole’s annual Net Zero Report found that companies in nine of 14 major sectors surveyed were intentionally decreasing their climate communications. Strikingly, the greenest companies were often the quietest: 88% of environmental services companies said they were decreasing climate messaging, even though 93% said they were on track to meet their targets (Grist, 2024). French companies, operating under some of the strictest anti-greenwashing rules in the world, led the pack, with 82% staying quiet (Grist, 2024).

Both patterns point to the same underlying gap. When there is no shared, neutral infrastructure that lets a company demonstrate that a claim meets a given rule’s requirements in a way regulators, investors, and the public can all check, companies either claim more than they can defend, or say nothing at all. Neither serves the underlying goal of driving changes to industry norms to promote greater investments in decarbonization. It is telling that even among companies that do set formal targets, the independent Net Zero Stocktake found that only 7% of corporate net-zero targets met minimum procedural and substantive integrity criteria in 2025 (NewClimate Institute, 2025).

Why this matters to both sides of every rule

For rule takers, meaning corporates and the advisory and assurance firms that serve them, the soft cost is a direct tax on the budget and staff capacity that would otherwise go to buying, financing, and deploying actual climate solutions. That matters more than usual right now: climate finance flows reached $1.9 trillion in 2023, the most recent full year of data, against an estimated need of $6.2–9.5 trillion a year through 2030 to stay on a net-zero pathway, an average annual gap of $5.9 trillion (Climate Policy Initiative and A&O Shearman, 2025). Every dollar spent reconciling the same claim across multiple frameworks is a dollar not spent closing that gap.

For rule makers — meaning policymakers, standards bodies, certification frameworks, and the methodologies underneath them — the same friction is a direct threat to the whole point of writing the rule in the first place. A standard that is expensive and confusing to implement gets implemented inconsistently, adopted slowly, and verified unevenly. This is precisely the outcome that erodes the credibility every rule maker depends on to keep companies engaged voluntarily and undermines the broader goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Both groups have the same interest in supporting the development of a different kind of infrastructure: a common, neutral layer that lets any organization translate a rule once, calculate against it consistently with available evidence, and produce a claim that other parties can check without rebuilding the interpretation from scratch, no matter the rule at hand.

With better sustainability market digital infrastructure that cuts climate action soft costs, rule takers can maximize their decarbonization efforts and rule makers can scale adoption of their rules with maximum efficiency and impact.

Sources

The Hidden Tax on Climate Action was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Energy Web Built Open-Source Component Inventory for Europe’s Digital Product Passports Development]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/energy-web-built-open-source-component-inventory-for-europes-digital-product-passports-development-ac701a9dcbeb?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/ac701a9dcbeb Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:30:17 GMT 2026-09-04T08:30:18.719Z

Introduction: A Decentralised Mandate Requires Assembled Infrastructure

A Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a digital record attached to a physical product: what it is made of, where its materials come from, and what happens to it through use, repair, and recycling [1]. Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the objective is for the DPP to be the default information carrier for almost every physical product placed on the EU market [2]. The Commission’s first ESPR working plan, adopted on 16 April 2025, identified six priority product groups for the 2025 to 2030 period: textiles and apparel, furniture, mattresses, tyres, iron and steel, and aluminium [3]. The indicative timeline records the central EU DPP Registry becoming operational on 20 July 2026, with the battery passport becoming mandatory on 18 February 2027 for electric vehicle batteries, light-means-of-transport batteries, home storage batteries and industrial batteries [4]. The architectural consequence is stated in the Commission’s description of the battery passport, intended to “operate through a decentralised system, with detailed battery information maintained by the responsible economic operator.”[4] To support access and tracking DPPs, the registry holds references rather than product data, and the substantive records remain with the economic operators that generate them (or operationally with their appointed DPP service provider). A system of that shape cannot be procured as a finished product from a single supplier. It has to be assembled from interoperable components: identifiers and resolvers, verifiable credentials, wallets and key management, storage, data exchange, ontologies and access control.

Most DPP offerings currently on the market are vendor-run platforms with their own data models, governance rules, and commercial terms, which becomes a constraint as soon as a single passport must be written by a material supplier, read by a manufacturer, checked by an auditor and updated by a recycler. However, regulation and specifically ESPR Article 10 requires passport information to be based on open standards, in an interoperable, machine-readable, structured and searchable format, and transferable through an open interoperable data exchange network without vendor lock-in [2]. Open-source implementations exist at every one of those layers, but they are distributed across GitHub, GitLab, and individual project sites with no shared index and no consistent signal of whether a given project is still maintained. Teams scoping DPP pilots have therefore repeated the same discovery work independently, often duplicating an assessment another team completed months earlier. Moreover, many of these solutions may not be compliant with the requirements laid out in the recently published harmonised standards for the European DPP [5], requiring project by project assessment.

Under the framework of CIRPASS-2, the EU and Swiss co-funded digital innovation initiative [6], which demonstrates DPPs at scale through 13 lighthouse pilots in textiles, electrical and electronic equipment, tyres, and construction materials (GA No 101158775), Energy Web helped provide an answer to that problem: the OpenDPP Catalogue. More specifically, Energy Web has led the CIRPASS-2 task on the Advanced DPP Digital Toolset, which resulted in the development of the OpenDPP Catalogue: user interface, the component grid, the filters, the detail cards, and the submission flow. The Catalogue contains open-source components for the development of DPP systems and related services, covering architecture, ontologies, and data space interoperability mechanisms, with candidate technologies including distributed ledgers, automatic code generation, reasoners, digital twin-to-DPP generators, decentralised identifiers and verifiable credentials [7]. The OpenDPP Catalogue is now operational on the CIRPASS-2 project site, which another project partner, F6S, has designed and technically maintains.

As underscored by the Energy Web CEO, Ewald Hesse,

“In line with our open, sustainability innovation mission, Energy Web designed and built the CIRPASS-2 OpenDPP Catalogue. We are proud to have contributed to a public directory of the open-source building blocks for a Digital Product Passport system.”

The Catalogue: Component Entries, Taxonomy, and Maintenance Signals

The OpenDPP Catalogue is a public directory of open-source components for building and operating DPP systems, published within CIRPASS-2, the EU co-funded initiative dedicated to large-scale, standardised, interoperable DPP piloting in multiple sectors across Europe [7]. It is now live, with more than 40 solutions listed and growing.

Figure 1: OpenDPP Catalogue landing page, https://cirpass2.eu/open-source-dpp-catalogue/

Each entry represents one open-source component and is presented as a card carrying the information required for a first technical screening: the architectural category, a maintenance status badge, the licence, the technology stack, and direct links to the repository and the documentation. Reaching source code from a category filter takes two clicks, with no registration. A manufacturer connecting product identifiers on QR codes to web resources filters into the redirect category and finds the GS1 Digital Link Resolver. A team resolving decentralised identifiers across multiple methods reaches the Universal Resolver, which implements the W3C DID Core 1.0 and DID Resolution specifications. A consortium seeking shared data models finds the Semantic Treehouse DPP Vocabulary Hub under ontologies, which generates implementation-ready JSON Schema, JSON-LD, and API formats from published DPP templates [8].

The organising principle is the layer a component serves rather than the vendor that publishes it. Current categories cover identifiers and resolution (ID, DID, DID resolver, and redirect), verifiable credentials with their schemas and APIs, digital wallets and encryption key management, storage, data exchange gateways and message brokers, data spaces and interoperability frameworks, ontologies, identity and access management, authentication and authorisation, verified compute and workflow and integration. Two further categories, Full Digital Product Passport and Full Product, hold whole solutions rather than single layers [8]

That structure maps closely onto the European DPP standardisation work. Eight standards were developed by CEN-CLC/JTC 24 under the European Commission’s standardisation request M/604, covering data exchange, unique identifiers, data carriers, storage, APIs, interoperability, access-rights management, and data authentication. Six were cited as harmonised standards in the Official Journal of the European Union on 15 July 2026, and the remaining two are expected to follow later in 2026 [9]. For policy teams and researchers, the resulting grid also functions as a maturity map. Some layers have several competing open implementations, others have one or none, and the gaps are where interoperability tends to break.

Maintenance status is recorded as a first-class attribute, with each entry marked Active, Stale, or Inactive, depending on the date of last commit: less than 6 months, Active; between 6 and 12 months, Stale; and more than 12 months, Inactive. Reuse of open-source infrastructure typically fails when a team commits to an abandoned repository, and that failure tends to emerge months into an implementation, once integration effort is already sunk. Recording status at the point of selection moves that discovery earlier. At present the IPFS entry is marked Inactive and the EU Digital Wallet Consortium RFCs are marked Stale, listed alongside active, versioned projects rather than filtered out, which gives implementers a view of the field as it stands rather than as a curated shortlist.

Figure 2: IPFS (left) and EU Digital Wallet Consortium (right) DPP cards

Energy Web Components in the Catalogue: Digital Spine and Verified Compute

Energy Web builds open-source infrastructure intended to make energy and sustainable product claims provable. Two of its contributions appear in the Catalogue, at different architectural layers.

Credential-governed data exchange. The Energy Web Digital Spine (EWDS) [10] Message Broker and Client Gateway, core components of Energy Web’s open-source data exchange layer for regulated multi-party markets, have been included as tools for DPP services development. The EWDS Message Broker handles messaging between organisations under credential-based access control, with no point-to-point integrations between participants and neither party exposing endpoints in its own systems to the other. The EWDS Client Gateway is the component each participant operates to connect its internal systems to the shared messaging layer. This system-agnostic infrastructure enables data sharing between participants without need for a central data hub, meaning that participants keep ownership and sovereignty over their data. The EWDS Message Broker manages the routing between Client Gateways according to the rules set by the participants, i.e. who can send/receive what from whom and when. This includes rules for the format and content of the payloads; the messages can currently be configured to fit any ontology or standard, such as CEN-CLC/JTC 24 for DPPs. The rules are stored on-chain, to keep them tamper-evident; while a series of defined verification logics are processed on the EWDS Client Gateway, so the EWDS Message Broker does not and cannot, read the payload, but only route it to the correct recipient. The passport application follows directly: a battery manufacturer collecting material declarations across a supplier network, or a recycler requiring notification when products reach end of life, describes credential-governed exchange between parties with differing commercial incentives. The alternative is a set of bilateral integrations that must be renegotiated whenever the composition of the value chain changes.

Independent verification service. Data exchange addresses movement rather than meaning. A recycled-content figure or an emissions value carries weight only where the party reading it can establish how that value was produced, and the Catalogue records the Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud (VCC) as a distinct architectural layer for this reason [11]. Under VCC, a computation executes at independent operators, consensus fixes the result, and the result carries a receipt linking it to the published methodology under which it was produced. Confirming such a result means checking the receipt and the methodology rather than re-executing the calculation, which is the property that matters for passport fields read by auditors, customs authorities and counterparties in procurement.

Figure 3: Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud DPP Card

Taken together, the two layers describe a progression that extends beyond product passports: credential-governed exchange establishes which parties may see which data, and verifiable computation establishes what the resulting figures mean. Energy Web is pursuing the same combination in energy and climate markets, including through diverse EU research and innovation projects.

The OpenDPP Catalogue makes the component-level building blocks available to any organisation assembling comparable infrastructure. Submissions remain open. Any organisation maintaining a relevant open-source component can list it through a three-step form covering the function of the solution, the location of the code, and maintainer contact details. A group of experts drawn from the project led by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) reviews new submissions and updates before publication, which keeps the directory consistent and dependable rather than exhaustive.

Carolynn Bernier, CIRPASS-2 Project Coordinator and Senior Research Engineer at CEA, concludes: “Our collaboration with Energy Web has led to a living Digital Product Passport catalogue whose category structure has become an informal reference architecture for DPP implementers. We invite other open source innovators to contribute to its growth.”

Start at the OpenDPP Catalogue. Learn more about Energy Web energy and sustainability market solutions at energyweb.org, or contact the team at commercial@energyweb.org

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

The OpenDPP Catalogue was developed within the CIRPASS-2 project, co-funded by the European Union and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under GA No 101158775. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA), or SERI.

References

[1] CIRPASS Consortium, “DPP in a nutshell,” cirpassproject.eu, 2023. https://cirpassproject.eu/dpp-in-a-nutshell/

[2] European Parliament and Council of the European Union, “Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 establishing a framework for the setting of ecodesign requirements for sustainable products,” Official Journal of the European Union, 13 June 2024. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng

[3] European Commission, Ecodesign for Sustainable Products and Energy Labelling Working Plan 2025–2030, COM(2025) 187 final, 16 April 2025. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52025DC0187

[4] European Commission, Digital Product Passport for Batteries: key requirements and implementation timelines, Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, accessed August 2026. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-market/digital-product-passport/batteries_en

[5] European Commission, Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736 of 14 July 2026 on harmonised standards for digital product passports drafted in support of Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 of the European Parliament and of the Council, OJ L, 2026/1736, 15 July 2026. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32026D1736

[6] European Commission, Cloud, Data and Artificial Intelligence: DIGITAL-2023-CLOUD-DATA-04-DIGIPASS, EU Funding and Tenders Portal, 2023. https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/digital-2023-cloud-data-04-digipass

[7] CIRPASS-2 Consortium, Who we are: Energy Web, role in the project, cirpass2.eu, accessed August 2026. https://cirpass2.eu/who-we-are/

[8] CIRPASS-2 Consortium, OpenDPP Catalogue, cirpass2.eu, accessed August 2026. https://cirpass2.eu/open-source-dpp-catalogue/

[9] CEN-CENELEC, “Digital Product Passport, the cornerstone for the implementation of sustainability and circularity on the European Single Market,” CEN-CENELEC News, 15 July 2026. https://www.cencenelec.eu/news-events/news/2026/en-in-the-spotlight/2026-07-15-dpp

[10] Energy Web, Energy Web Digital Spine (EWDS) Documentation, available at docs.energyweb.org, accessed September 2026. https://docs.energyweb.org/energy-solutions/digital-spine-by-energy-web

[11] Energy Web Foundation, Energy Web 2025 Yellow Paper: Decentralized Technology and Governance Framework, 4 December 2025. https://energyweb.org/EnergyWeb_YellowPaper2025.pdf

Energy Web Built Open-Source Component Inventory for Europe’s Digital Product Passports Development was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[DER Data Infrastructure Development From Proof of Concept to National Production in Australia…]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/der-data-infrastructure-development-from-proof-of-concept-to-national-production-in-australia-0f8cde67a49c?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/0f8cde67a49c Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:44:18 GMT 2026-08-20T14:44:20.051Z DER Data Infrastructure Development From Proof of Concept to National Production in Australia: Energy Web’s Insights for Grid Operators Worldwide

Electricity systems everywhere face the same structural problem from different starting points. Distributed energy resources (DER) such as rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicles are growing faster than the digital infrastructure needed to coordinate them. A 2023 case study by the UNECE Task Force on Digitalization in Energy, which examined Australia’s Project EDGE as one of two international reference implementations, observes that the rising share of DERs is still not sufficiently harnessed for its potential in the energy transition while continuing to create challenges for grid management. The same study identifies three reference infrastructure requirements for DER integration: simplified DER installation, submetering capacity, and a flexibility registry that gives DERs identification and standardised interconnection functionality while maintaining privacy and security [1].

Australia addressed this challenge systematically earlier than most. Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)’s 2026 Integrated System Plan places consumer energy resources (CER) at the centre of the National Electricity Market (NEM) to 2050, projecting around 87 GW of rooftop and small-scale solar (up from 69 GW in the 2022 plan and 72 GW in 2024), supported by roughly 35 GW of household and commercial batteries, with electric vehicles now counted as CER for the first time. Rooftop and small-scale solar is projected to grow around threefold from about 25 GW today [2]. Since 2021, Energy Web has worked with AEMO on a sequence of programs, Project EDGE, Project Symphony, Project UEP and Project Jupiter, that took a verifiable credential-governed data exchange architecture from an off-market trial to live production, with a NEM-wide Consumer Energy Resources (CER) Data Exchange now in detailed design. This article sets out what was built, the specific technical problems each phase solved, and why the resulting pattern, in particular the combination of a data exchange hub, a flexibility registry function, and verifiable computation, is directly relevant to grid operators in Europe and elsewhere.

Project EDGE: Testing a Two-Sided DER Marketplace (2021–2023)

Project EDGE (Energy Demand and Generation Exchange) was an off-market research trial in North-East Victoria led by AEMO, AusNet and Mondo. Announcing the AUD 12.9 million Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) grant for this project in 2021, ARENA CEO Darren Miller framed the stakes plainly: “these technologies are going to transform our electricity system” [3]. The trial onboarded 324 customers, coordinated more than 400 DER assets representing 3.5 MW of flexible capacity and ran continuous field operations for 333 days against real Victorian wholesale market prices, supported by 54 platform releases and 22 field test scenarios [4, 5]. Its purpose was not promotional; it was to answer a set of research questions about whether price-responsive DER could participate in the wholesale market while respecting distribution network limits, and how the necessary data should move between parties. The final report concluded that “point-to-point DER data exchange is not scalable for a 100GW DER future” and that a shared DER data hub would reduce industry integration costs by AUD 0.44 billion over 20 years relative to bilateral integrations, based on the independent Deloitte Access Economics cost-benefit analysis [5, Section 6.3.1 and Chapter 3; 6]. EY’s technology and cybersecurity assessment ranked data hub approaches above the point-to-point model in its multi-criteria analysis, with the point-to-point model scoring lowest, while a decentralised energy data management architecture scored highest, as illustrated in the report’s figure 3 also shown here below [7]:

Figure 1. Summary of theoretical assessment of data exchange options [EY, 7]

In this first pilot project, Energy Web built the decentralized data exchange layer. It issued verifiable credentials to decentralised identities for every project partner through the Energy Web SSI-Hub, built and operated the decentralised DER data hub, and enabled Dynamic Operating Envelope passthrough using privacy-preserving Operating Envelopes Partitioning executed through Decentralised Logic Execution, the precursor of today’s Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud.

Project Symphony: Applying the Stack in a Second Market (2021–2024)

Project Symphony, ARENA-supported collaboration between Western Power, Synergy, Energy Policy WA and AEMO, was Western Australia’s largest DER orchestration pilot, coordinating approximately 900 DER assets across about 500 homes and businesses within the Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM, 8]. It demonstrated distinct operating roles for the market operator, the distribution system operator, and the aggregator, and tested DER dispatch alongside network support services under the WEM Reform framework, with results published via ARENA in June 2024. The technically significant result is portability. The Energy Web stack proven in the NEM region via Project EDGE: decentralised identity, message broker, and credential-governed data channels, ran in the structurally different WEM environment without redesign. For any operator assessing this class of architecture, that is the relevant test: whether the integration model survives contact with a second market’s rules, actors, and legacy systems.

Project UEP: The Transition to Production (2024)

Project UEP, the Unregistered Equipment Portal (UEP) moved the architecture into AEMO production. Active production use cases include Emergency Solar Management (ESM), Non-Co-optimised Essential System Services (NCESS), and Supplementary Capacity (SC). According to a presentation to AEMO’s WA DER Market Participation Forum in March 2024, opened by Tom Butler, AEMO’s Acting Group Manager for WA Market Development and Energy Procurement, with the UEP presented by Jean-Philippe Montandon, Acting Manager, WA Distributed Markets, AEMO describes the UEP as:

“a secure and open-access business-to-business digital solution” [that] “allows AEMO to better enable and manage Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) in the WEM by reducing reliance on manual processes. It enables AEMO “to send and receive Activation instructions, notification and confirmation with NCESS and SRC service providers in the WEM […]; facilitates the exchange of diverse datasets, ranging from ‘real-time’ telemetry to bulk file uploads, in support of multiple DER use cases (including EMS availability); and Integrates with a central infrastructure (i.e. the message broker)” [9].

That central infrastructure is running on the Energy Web Digital Spine (EWDS) stack. Energy Web’s operational role in UEP is that of a key infrastructure provider rather than application vendor: it ensures that the production message broker underpinning all UEP data flows continuously operates, issues and manages the verifiable credentials that govern role-based channel access, maintains the topic and channel structure through which operational data moves, and provides platform operations and participant onboarding for the live environment. It is interoperable with AEMO applications, enabling data to be exchanged seamlessly and presented to end users through standard interfaces.

Project Jupiter: Extending the Production Platform (2025 — Present)

Effective and agile production infrastructure absorbs new use cases without rebuilds. Project Jupiter, a funded collaboration between Western Power, Synergy, AEMO, and Energy Policy WA supported by a grant from the Australian Government’s ARENA Advancing Renewables Program, has been underway since February 2025, extending the production environment by onboarding new participants and two new business data flows, Network Support Services (NSS) and Dynamic Operating Envelopes (DOEs). Energy Web is deploying the new topics and channels across development, test and production environments, supporting decentralised identifier and role enrolment for the participants, validating end-to-end message exchange against agreed sample datasets and supporting cybersecurity testing and remediation [10].

The Architecture: Energy Web Digital Spine

Figure 2: Energy Web Digital Spine Architecture Components

The continuity across all four programs rests on four architectural decisions in the Energy Web Digital Spine (EWDS). These correspond closely to the innovations the UNECE case study identifies as necessary to overcome the three core challenges of DER data exchange: identities and permissions, integration and information integrity [1, Table 1, p. 9].

Self-sovereign identity as the trust anchor. The Energy Web SSI-Hub implements W3C Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials, with role assignments issued as tamper-proof credentials held by each participant’s own digital identity. Access rights are cryptographically provable without a central directory, alleviating the risk for grid operators since they no longer serve as the single custodial point for identity data. At the same time, role issuance is still established by the governing body, cryptographically extending and ensuring the regulation-prescribed governance of the energy market operation. Parties only exchange data once identity is asserted and roles are affirmed.

Participant-hosted gateways. Each participant runs an EWDS Client Gateway, a container under its own control holding its data, credentials and keys, connected to the shared market fabric through open standards via REST, WebSocket, or file transfer APIs, streamlining data sharing and facilitating participant onboarding. This replaces bespoke bilateral integrations with a single integration per participant, the mechanism behind the cost differential the EDGE cost-benefit analysis quantified.

A credential-governed message broker. The EWDS Message Broker, built on NATS JetStream with a DID-based authorisation proxy, handles topic governance, payload delivery and secure peer-to-peer channel routing at production grade.

Topic governance as a first-class construct. Schema definitions, versioned data contracts and credential-enforced access control are native properties of every topic, so market rules can evolve without coordinated cut-over dates and access policy is enforced without gaps.

In this architecture, blockchain technology is leveraged to authorize data transfers through DIDs and Verifiable Credentials ensuring optimum data exchange security at both sender and receiver ends. The stack is open source under GPL v3, and any integrator can connect through the Energy Web Digital Spine Client Gateway. As underscored by UNECE analysis of EDGE, this decentralised data exchange has no single point of failure by design, is modular and interoperable, operates under shared governance rather than single-entity control and can support any agreed data model and communication protocol [1, p. 11].

From Decentralised Logic Execution to Verified Compute

Moving data between parties that do not fully trust one another is the entry point. The harder problem is computation over that data: workflows where inputs are commercially sensitive, results affect competing parties, and a neutral executor is required. In EDGE, the UNECE study notes, this was addressed through Decentralised Logic Execution, which combined the shared messaging layer with identity-based message authentication and distributed consensus to ensure consistency and verifiability without relying on a single broker [1].

That capability has since matured into the Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud (VCC), described in the Energy Web 2025 Yellow Paper as “off-chain business logic computation with on-chain finality” [11, Sections 2.3 and 5]. Independent VCC operators execute the same computation in parallel, submit attestations for consensus, anchor the agreed result on the Energy Web X blockchain, and relay it to the appropriate recipients through EWDS channels. The original EDGE proof of concept was anchored on the earlier Energy Web Chain and computed by AEMO alone; the current VCC runs on Energy Web X with independent rather than self-reported verification, and each deployment defines its own verification logic, privacy model, operator set and consensus rules [11].

Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud can be leveraged for critical workflows managed by market and grid operators. For instance, aggregators could submit dispatch offers that VCC operators combine into composite offers under agreed business logic, with individual pricing strategies remaining confidential. In multi-party settlement, revenue-sharing and allocation logic would execute across participants without the market operator needing access to raw commercial positions. Such a verification service is already operational in a regulated production setting outside the power sector: Energy Web operates the SAFc Registry, a sustainable aviation fuel certificate platform launched in late 2023 by RMI and EDF in collaboration with the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance and Energy Web, where VCC operators continuously validate certificates using cryptographic proofs over pseudonymised data and verification outcomes are publicly inspectable through an explorer at verify.safcregistry.org [12].

The Future of Flexibility Registries and Grid Digital Infrastructure

In May 2025, AEMO concluded a national industry co-design for a CER Data Exchange, reaching a stakeholder-aligned preferred option built on the data hub pattern. The co-design summary reaffirmed the economics first established in EDGE, finding that a data hub would reduce industry costs “by up to 440–450 million AUD compared to a point-to-point approach” over a 20-year horizon [13]. The detailed design and implementation phase began in November 2025, covering three priority use cases and an implementation roadmap through 2027 [14]. The same credential-governed channel model is positioned to absorb the next layer of grid-edge complexity, using the identical topic and credential pattern that DER aggregators use today for additional devices and services.

The policy conclusions drawn from the Australian experience are not pertinent to Australia alone. The UNECE case study, addressed to policy makers globally, recommends that “Implementing a data exchange hub/flexibility registry, should be a priority across jurisdictions” and adds that a decentralised data exchange can offer greater scalability, resilience, and security than centralised systems [1, pp. 19–20]. European industry bodies point in the same direction: smartEn argues that flexibility registers should be bidirectional tools for service providers and system operators, carrying information on flexible assets alongside system operators’ flexibility needs and congestion data [15]. Meanwhile, ACER’s 2022 Framework Guideline on Demand Response established the first European legal guidance on submetering, with granularity and fair data access requirements that presuppose exactly this kind of shared, governed data infrastructure [16].

Functionally, the infrastructure described in this article already performs the flexibility registry role the UNECE study defines: it identifies assets and organisations through decentralised identifiers, standardises interconnection through governed topics and schemas, enforces fair data access through verifiable credentials, and preserves privacy through participant-held keys and pseudonymised computation. The addition of verified compute extends the registry from a record of assets to a substrate for services: envelope allocation, dispatch verification, settlement and compliance checks can each run as neutral, auditable computations over registry data.

Speaking at Australian Energy Week in June 2026, AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman argued that “enabling the whole energy system will result in a lower cost system for everyone”, with an array of further actions to be taken, from technical standards to enhancing visibility for an increasingly complex distributed energy market [17].

As underscored by Ewald Hesse, Energy Web CEO:

“The collaborative work undertaken by AEMO and Energy Web over the past five years demonstrates how trusted digital identity, interoperable data exchange and verifiable coordination can provide foundational capabilities for this next phase of grid evolution.”

In addition to continued collaboration with AEMO, Energy Web is also working to bring the trusted digital infrastructure to support emerging flexibility markets and AI-enabled grid operations to other regions, building on its existing engagements with international grid operators, including via EU research and innovation programs. For operators weighing the decisions AEMO faced in 2021, the evidence base now includes four projects and five consecutive program designs, a production deployment, published independent assessments by EY and Deloitte Access Economics, and strong reference architecture. The Australian experience does not remove the design questions every jurisdiction must answer on ownership, governance and cost recovery; it demonstrates that once those questions are answered, the technology to implement the answer exists and is running effectively.

Learn more at energyweb.org, or contact the team at commercial@energyweb.org

References

1. UNECE Task Force on Digitalization in Energy, Grid Edge Management Reference Architecture and Policy Recommendations for Interoperability and Resilience, UNECE, Geneva, 2023. https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2023-12/Grid_Edge_case.study_.2023_rev.3.pdf

2. AEMO, 2026 Integrated System Plan for the National Electricity Market: A Roadmap for the Energy Transition, June 2026. https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/2026/2026-integrated-system-plan-isp.pdf

3. ARENA, Distributed Energy Marketplace Trial Giving Consumers an Edge, ARENA News, February 2021. https://arena.gov.au/news/distributed-energy-marketplace-trial-giving-consumers-an-edge/

4. AEMO, Project EDGE Infographic, AEMO, October 2023. https://aemo.com.au/initiatives/major-programs/nem-distributed-energy-resources-der-program/der-demonstrations/project-edge

5. AEMO, Project EDGE Final Report, October 2023. https://arena.gov.au/assets/2023/10/AEMO-Project-EDGE-Final-Report.pdf

6. Deloitte Access Economics, Project EDGE Cost Benefit Analysis Final Report, 2023, published via AEMO Project EDGE reports. https://www.aemo.com.au/initiatives/major-programs/nem-distributed-energy-resources-der-program/der-demonstrations/project-edge/project-edge-reports/cost-benefit-analysis

7. EY, Project EDGE: Technology and Cyber Security Assessment, May 2023, published via AEMO Project EDGE reports. https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/der/2023/project-edge-technology-and-cybersecurity-assessment-final.pdf

8. AEMO, Project Symphony 2021–2024, AEMO, 2024; results and recommendations published via ARENA in June 2024. https://aemo.com.au/initiatives/major-programs/wa-der-program/project-symphony

9. AEMO, WA DER Market Participation Forum, presentation, 28 March 2024. https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/stakeholder_consultation/working_groups/der-program/wa-der-market-participation-forum/2024/wa-der-forum_28-march-2024.pdf

10. ARENA, Project Jupiter 2025–2026, ARENA project page. https://arena.gov.au/projects/project-jupiter/

11. Energy Web Foundation, Energy Web 2025 Yellow Paper: Decentralized Technology and Governance Framework, 4 December 2025. http://energyweb.org/documents/2025YellowPaper.pdf

12. Energy Web Foundation, Energy Web Implements Continuous Live Verification for the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAFc) Registry, Energy Web Insights, Medium, February 2026. https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/revamping-book-and-claim-registries-18738d98a1c6

13. AEMO, CER Data Exchange Industry Co-Design: Co-Design Summary, AEMO, April 2025, published via ARENA. https://arena.gov.au/assets/2025/08/AEMO-%E2%80%93-CER-Data-Exchange-Industry-Co-Design-%E2%80%93-Co-Design-Summary.pdf

14. AEMO, Consumer Energy Resources (CER) Data Exchange, NEM Reform Program initiative page. https://www.aemo.com.au/initiatives/major-programs/nem-reform-program/nem-reform-program-initiatives/consumer-energy-resources-data-exchange

15. smartEn, Spotlight Report on Data Sharing by System Operators, February 2023. https://smarten.eu/news/report-l-spotlight-on-data-sharing-from-system-operators/

16. ACER, Framework Guideline on Demand Response, December 2022. https://www.acer.europa.eu/news-and-events/news/acer-submitted-framework-guideline-demand-response-european-commission-first-step-towards-binding-eu-rules

17. Daniel Westerman, AEMO CEO Speech at Australian Energy Week 2026, published by pv magazine Australia, 12 June 2026. https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2026/06/12/aemo-ceo-speech-at-australian-energy-week-2026/

18. ARENA, AEMO CER Data Exchange Industry Co-Design, ARENA project page, 2025. https://arena.gov.au/projects/aemo-cer-data-exchange-industry-co-design/

19. Energy Web Foundation, AEMO Announces Open-Source Operating System for World-Leading Distributed Energy Marketplace Design Trial, Energy Web Insights, Medium, September 2021. https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/aemo-announces-open-source-operating-system-for-world-leading-distributed-energy-marketplace-design-a211a6f6c415

DER Data Infrastructure Development From Proof of Concept to National Production in Australia… was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Energy Web turns Energy Community Business Models into Verifiable Energy Services via InEExS EU…]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/energy-web-turns-energy-community-business-models-into-verifiable-energy-services-via-ineexs-eu-1365f5f72af0?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/1365f5f72af0 Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:43:21 GMT 2026-07-09T09:43:22.677Z Energy Web turns Energy Community Business Models into Verifiable Energy Services via InEExS EU Clean Energy Project

Europe’s energy transition is no longer constrained by hardware. Solar (PV), wind, batteries, electric vehicles (EV) and heat pumps are scaling, and at an accelerating rate. What remains constrained is trust: trust in savings calculations, in flexibility delivery, in compliance reporting and in the integrity of cross-sector energy services.

Energy Web stepped in with a digital infrastructure solution, demonstrated in both commercial and innovation projects, including a recently completed, European Union’s LIFE Clean Energy Transition programme InEExS [Innovative Energy (Efficiency) Service Models for Sector Integration via Blockchain], which ran from November 2022. The project consortium brought together 12 partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Greece, and Finland, including the Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy — IEECP (NL, project coordinators), Berliner Energieagentur — BEA (DE), Cooperativa Eléctrica Benéfica San Francisco de Asís (ES), domx (GR) and Fortum Power and Heat Oy (FI), with the shared objective of building integrated, blockchain-backed energy service models qualifying for compliance under the European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) Article 7 Energy Efficiency Obligation Schemes, which covers the energy consumption in the public sector, renovation of public buildings and public procurement.

Energy Web served as the InEExS project’s principal technology solution provider, deploying the Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud (VCC) as the digital trust layer that rendered InEExS business models verifiable, automatable and commercially credible.

InEExS Demonstration: From Blockchain Concept to Verified Compute Infrastructure

Energy Web was established in 2017 with a mission to accelerate decarbonization through decentralized technology. Its Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud (VCC) operates over a network of independent computer nodes (VCC operators), running data and process verification checks and calculations to produce tamper-proof, publicly verifiable results. VCC allows enterprises to deploy business logic like any cloud service, but with cryptographic verification, distributed attestation and tamper-proof auditability, meaning that partners run their calculations, independent computers re-run and cross-check them, then results go onto the Energy Web blockchain (EWX).

In the InEExS context, the Energy Web technology demonstration meant:

  • Energy calculations, such as energy savings, self-consumption ratios and flexibility activations, run in each implementing partner’s own system;
  • Independent VCC Operators re-executed and verified those computations in parallel, each submitting their result to a shared digital ledger (blockchain).
  • Consensus agreement is locked as the final result on the Energy Web (EWX) chain; no single party can change it after.
  • Sensitive data remains private, while outputs become publicly verifiable.

Energy Web did not replace the business logic developed by each partner. It made that logic verifiable. This distinction is critical. InEExS business cases required regulatory credibility, investor confidence, and operational trust among participating utilities, Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), energy communities, and obligated parties, i.e. energy suppliers or distributors who are legally obliged to prove claimed energy savings under national EED. VCC delivered the execution guarantees that transformed estimates into evidence.

Importantly, the Energy Web VCC platform was developed independently of the InEExS project. In InEExS, Energy Web customized and deployed VCC for each business case: designing Verification Logic (the automated calculation routines that VCC executes and independently verifies), auditing and publishing protocols on-chain, providing technical guidance, and covering infrastructure costs for the project’s duration.

Four Business Cases. One Trust Layer.

Across InEExS pilots, Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud has functioned as a digital certifier, automated Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) and flexibility verifier, depending on the use case, as briefly presented here:

Figure 1. Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud application in EU InEExS Project
  • Berlin: Solving the Landlord–Tenant Split Incentive
    Pay for performance: Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud computed solar quota, solar use and electric vehicles solar quota for multi-tenant buildings, enabling savings according to Energy Performance Certificates (EPC).

As explained by Franziska Tucci, project manager of Berliner Energieagentur (BEA):

“With our case study, we aimed to demonstrate greater transparency for our electricity customers regarding both the generation of electricity from the rooftop PV and their actual electricity usage. Furthermore, the calculations performed in the Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud provided the foundation for developing dynamic tariffs based on actual solar energy utilization.”

The Berlin pilot was led by BEA, Berlin’s public energy agency, with a focus on residential apartment buildings in the city. The challenge was structural: solar self-consumption and dynamic tariff models depend on accurately allocating production and consumption between landlords and tenants. Without trusted measurement, Pay-for-Performance contracts remain fragile.

Energy Web deployed the Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud (VCC) with three Verification Logic protocols: Solar Quota (the ratio of PV energy consumed per building), Solar Utilization (efficiency of PV capacity used by tenants) and EV Solar Quota (the ratio of PV energy consumed per electric vehicle). Solar production and consumption data were calculated by BEA’s own systems. VCC independently verified those calculations and produced a tamper-resistant record of who consumed what, and when. This enabled enforceable, data-backed service agreements. Trust moved from contractual language to cryptographic proof.

  • Crevillent, Spain: Gamified Energy Community Incentives
    Improved distributed energy resources (DER) self-consumption: Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud computed solar and grid efficiency ratios.

The Crevillent pilot was led by ENERCOOP, a local energy cooperative serving 65 member households. The challenge was behavioral: the community needed members to shift demand toward PV generation peaks. Incentives existed, but without proof of load shifting, they lacked credibility. When members of this energy cooperative saw their load shifts registered and rewarded automatically with Energy Web technology, the doubts about whether it counted just stopped, and program participation followed.

Energy Web provided two Verification Logic protocols: Solar Efficiency (the monthly self-consumption ratio per user) and Grid Efficiency (changes in self-consumption behavior across periods). VCC verified deviations from expected consumption profiles and recorded those results on the blockchain, where digital rewards were automatically allocated to each member based on their verified behavior. Incentives became credible financial instruments, backed by data rather than assumptions.

  • Greece: Verifying Energy Efficiency for Certificate Issuance
    Smart boiler control: Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud computed actual energy consumption and daily savings from DOMX Heating Controller.

Stratos Keranidis, co-founder and R&D Director at domx stated:

“We knew that our IoT-based space heating system was saving energy every day. What we could not do before was provide trusted proof of those savings to energy suppliers and energy efficiency certification bodies. Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud closed that gap.”

The Greek pilot was led by domx, a technology provider specializing in IoT-based heating management solutions. The pilot was implemented across five Greek cities (Athens, Thessaloniki, Larisa, Trikala, Volos) involving 50 retail consumers using heat pumps and natural gas boilers. The use case focused on improving the energy efficiency of space heating systems. Traditionally, energy savings are calculated using baseline estimations, which are often difficult to validate, open to dispute, and rarely monetized at scale.

Energy Web deployed two Verifications:

  1. Actual Energy Consumption, verifying daily energy use for space heating based on DOMX IoT controller data.
  2. Energy Savings Estimation, verifying daily kWh savings by comparing baseline operation with energy-saving mode.

Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud acted as an automated MRV layer, verifying that the logic executed correctly and producing tamper-resistant outputs. This transformed estimated energy savings into verifiable results, a prerequisite for issuing Energy Savings Certificates under Article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED).

By replacing estimation with verification, VCC demonstrated how energy efficiency compliance can become programmable, transparent, and scalable.

  • Nordics: Proving Flexibility Delivery
    Smart EV charging scheduling: Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud computed cost savings from schedules submitted via smart contracts.

The Nordic pilot was led by Fortum Power and Heat Oy, one of the region’s leading energy companies, headquartered in Espoo, Finland. Smart homes in the pilot could shift between EV charging and heating loads, but grid operators require proof of flexibility delivery before it can be traded as a service. Energy Web provided the Smart Charge Savings Verification Logic protocol, calculating cost savings based on submitted EV charging schedules. VCC verified deviations from baseline consumption profiles without exposing sensitive household data. Each flexibility action generated a tamper-proof digital record. This bridged the gap between distributed assets and grid-level trust requirements, enabling flexibility to become a tradable, auditable service.

Across all four cases, the pattern is clear: different services, same enhanced and reliable trust layer.

Commercial Pathways Beyond InEExS

The implications of Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud capabilities extend beyond the InEExS pilots.

  • Utilities and obligated parties can deploy VCC-backed compliance infrastructure to automate reporting under EED Article 7. Instead of manual audits and fragmented documentation, savings become continuously verifiable digital assets.
  • Energy communities can embed VCC into local platforms to render peer demand response incentives, shared self-consumption, and any future energy trading and flexibility schemes auditable and finance-ready.
  • ESCOs and aggregators can package verified performance data into investable portfolios, reducing counterparty risk and enabling performance-based financing.
  • Service providers, such as IoT, building energy management systems (BEMS) and EV charging platform operators, can integrate VCC via APIs to offer verification-as-a-service on top of existing energy management platforms.
Figure 2. Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud: neutral, decentralized infrastructure, enabling interoperability among multiple commercial energy services

By embedding decentralized verification into sector-integrated business models, Energy Web in InEExS project demonstrated a solution that provides a set of data security and privacy guarantees, benefiting prosumers and energy communities:

  • Savings cannot be manipulated retroactively.
  • Flexibility delivery is provable without exposing private data.
  • Contract execution becomes transparent and automatable
  • Compliance moves from paperwork to programmable evidence.

Energy Web turns Energy Community Business Models into Verifiable Energy Services via InEExS EU… was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Energy Web and Azzera Join Forces to AdvanceTrusted SAF Compliance and Digital Verification for…]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/energy-web-and-azzera-join-forces-to-advance-trusted-saf-compliance-and-digital-verification-for-da9a7ba93660?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/da9a7ba93660 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:43:39 GMT 2026-06-17T12:53:48.259Z Energy Web and Azzera Join Forces to AdvanceTrusted SAF Compliance and Digital Verification for Aviation

Collaboration combines sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) compliance expertise with trusted digital infrastructure to improve transparency, reporting, and environmental integrity
across the aviation sector

Zug, 16 June 2026 — Energy Web and Azzera Inc. today announced a strategic collaboration to support the next generation of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) compliance, reporting and verification solutions for the aviation industry. By combining Azzera’s aviation-focused decarbonization
platform with Energy Web’s trusted digital infrastructure, the companies aim to streamline SAF certificate management, enhance transparency and strengthen confidence in environmental claims across the SAF value chain.

The collaboration builds on the successful execution of a SAF Proof of Delivery (POD) pilot, which demonstrated how digital verification can improve traceability and trust in SAF transactions. The pilot explored mechanisms for securely validating fuel delivery events and connecting sustainability attributes to verifiable digital records, helping address longstanding challenges around chain-of-custody, reporting accuracy and stakeholder trust.

As SAF adoption accelerates globally, airlines, corporate customers, fuel suppliers, and regulators face growing demands for auditable evidence supporting emissions reductions and sustainability claims. The partnership between Energy Web and Azzera seeks to address these needs through interoperable digital solutions that enable reliable data exchange and verifiable compliance workflows.

A key component of the collaboration is the integration of Energy Web’s Verified Compute technology. Verified Compute enables organizations to prove that calculations, reporting processes, and digital workflows have been executed as intended using distributed computing environments. Applied to SAF compliance and environmental attribute management, Verified Compute can help provide assurance that critical emissions accounting, certificate allocation and compliance-related calculations are performed transparently and consistently.

“Trust and transparency are foundational to scaling sustainable aviation fuel markets,” said Katy Lohmann, CCO, Energy Web. “Our collaboration with Azzera demonstrates how trusted digital infrastructure and verifiable computing can help establish confidence in SAF-related data, compliance processes and environmental claims. Together, we are helping to build the digital foundations necessary for aviation’s decarbonization journey.”
“If we are to scale SAF demand, we need to reduce the administrative costs for aircraft operators to claim SAF usage incentives today. Our collaboration helps set the foundational trust in such a multi-stakeholder process,” said Anant Jain, COO, Azzera. “By combining Azzera’s expertise in aviation sustainability with Energy Web’s digital trust technologies, including Verified Compute, we can deliver greater transparency, accountability and most critically efficiency across SAF programs and reporting frameworks.”

The companies envision a future where SAF sustainability attributes can be tracked, allocated, and reported through secure digital systems that reduce administrative complexity while improving auditability. The SAF POD pilot serves as an important milestone toward that objective, demonstrating how trusted digital verification can support more efficient and credible SAF markets. Together, we are designing a verification architecture that addresses all three problems: cross-platform evidence uniqueness, independent emission factor resolution and deterministic calculation validation.

Two of Europe’s leading aviation emissions verifiers have joined the pilot to help define what auditor-ready evidence packages should look like in practice.

Normec Verifavia (normecverifavia.com) is a globally recognised leader in aviation emissions verification, accredited under ISO/IEC 17029:2019 (the details of the accreditation can be found here: Normec Verifavia — Leading Independent Emissions Verification & Sustainability). Normec Verifavia has verified the emissions of more than 300 commercial airlines across more than 100 countries under EU ETS, UK ETS, Swiss ETS, and ICAO CORSIA. They actively support airlines in their transition to Sustainable Aviation Fuels through dedicated SAF Programme Assurance audits. Their participation in this pilot ensures that the verification outputs are shaped by the auditors who will ultimately rely on them.

ETS Verification GmbH (etsverification.com), headquartered in Germany, is a leading independent verification body specialising in aviation environmental compliance and greenhouse gas assurance. Accredited by the German Emissions Trading Authority (DEHSt) and operating in accordance with ISO/IEC 17029:2019, ETS Verification provides verification services under EU ETS, UK ETS, Swiss ETS, ICAO CORSIA, and ReFuelEU. With a broad international client portfolio, ETS Verification supports commercial airlines, cargo operators, business aviation companies, and corporate flight departments worldwide. The company combines extensive aviation-specific expertise with a deep understanding of emissions monitoring, fuel reporting, regulatory compliance, and sustainability requirements. In addition to emissions verification, ETS Verification has experience in Non-CO₂ aviation climate impact verification and greenhouse gas audits, supporting operators in addressing emerging environmental reporting and assurance requirements.

Together with Normec Verifavia, ETS Verification will evaluate whether machine-verifiable evidence packages can reduce verification effort, enhance audit coverage, and deliver outputs that meet the stringent requirements of EU ETS, CORSIA, ReFuelEU Aviation, and future sustainability reporting obligations. Their feedback will contribute directly to the development of verification logic, evidence package structures, and auditor access protocols, ensuring that the resulting framework reflects the needs and expectations of experienced aviation verifiers.

Beyond SAF delivery verification, the collaboration will explore broader opportunities to leverage trusted digital infrastructure for aviation sustainability initiatives, including emissions reporting, certificate management, compliance automation, and environmental attribute accounting.

As governments, regulators, and industry participants continue to expand SAF deployment and establish new compliance frameworks, Energy Web and Azzera are committed to supporting scalable, interoperable solutions that strengthen market integrity and accelerate progress toward aviation decarbonization goals.

About Energy Web

Energy Web is a global nonprofit organization building and operating open-source digital infrastructure to accelerate the energy transition. Through technologies that enable trusted data exchange, digital identity, and verifiable computing, Energy Web helps organizations create transparent and interoperable solutions for energy and environmental markets.

About Azzera

Azzera provides aviation-focused sustainability solutions that help airlines and corporate customers manage emissions reduction strategies, including sustainable aviation fuel programs, environmental attribute management, and carbon market participation. Through digital tools and industry expertise, Azzera supports the aviation sector’s transition toward a lower-carbon future.

Energy Web and Azzera Join Forces to AdvanceTrusted SAF Compliance and Digital Verification for… was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

]]> <![CDATA[Energy Web implements continuous live verification for the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAFc)…]]> https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/revamping-book-and-claim-registries-18738d98a1c6?source=rss----cc0d1aa19f01---4 https://medium.com/p/18738d98a1c6 Tue, 12 May 2026 08:12:06 GMT 2026-05-12T08:12:08.128Z Energy Web implements continuous live verification for the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAFc) Registry.

When Energy Web launched the SAFc Registry two years ago alongside Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA), our goal was ambitious but clear: create a trusted, market-ready book-and-claim platform. It aims to unlock corporate demand and meaningfully accelerate the production and use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Energy Web’s cutting-edge technology powers the SAFc Registry, enabling SAF producers to issue SAF certificates (SAFc) — the decoupled environmental attributes of low-emissions aviation fuel — and transfer them to corporate customers, who rely on aviation for business travel or transporting goods, and airlines who purchase SAFc to address emissions from their operations for corporate reporting.

Translating progressive policies into a transparent governance framework and a user-friendly interface, while leveraging blockchain’s potent provenance, automation and security functionalities, has yielded remarkable results:

  • Over 150,000 tonnes of SAFc have been issued to date, which is equivalent to more than 2,000 New York to London flights using sustainable fuel.
  • Over 500,000 tonnes of CO2 have been abated, comparable to the annual emissions of driving nearly 2 billion kilometers in an average gasoline car.
  • Over a hundred corporate customers — from the world’s largest multinationals to emerging climate entrepreneurs — use the Registry to reduce their emissions.
  • The Registry counts an increasing number of airlines, fuel producers, and logistics partners among its active participants, demonstrating broad adoption across the SAF value chain.
  • Retirements continue to grow quarter over quarter, with increasingly diverse beneficiaries.

These milestones are proof of a rapidly maturing SAF ecosystem. They signal a community willing to invest and collaborate to innovate and advance SAFc as a strategic lever in global decarbonization programs.

Figure 1: Sustainable Aviation Fuel Certificates Monthly Issuance, September 2024-December 2025

A key advantage of the SAFc Registry is its nimble policy approach, guided by an active and knowledgeable governing body representing producers, airlines, corporate buyers, non-governmental organisations, and technical experts. Over the last year, registry policies were expanded to recognize and incorporate more high-quality SAF, by ensuring neutrality across production pathways, certification schemes, and standards-setting bodies. On the technology side, Energy Web’s development team has implemented steady upgrades to integrate customer preferences and feedback. Improvements to the user interface, data structures, reporting tools, and API have rendered the Registry faster, more intuitive and scalable. Today we’re delighted to share the next step in this journey: enabling unprecedented levels of transparency in certificate markets with Energy Web’s groundbreaking solution called Verified Compute Cloud.

The Challenge: Enhancing Trust in Sustainability Reporting

A platform like the SAFc Registry asks users to trust that each certificate represents a unique event with a measurable climate impact: the use of a bona fide low-carbon asset by a real person or company at a specific location and moment in time, creating real emissions savings. Doubts about any aspect of this claim undermine the value of the certificate. A 2023 study by PwC revealed 94% of investors believe corporate reporting on sustainability performance contains unsupported claims.

The Solution: Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud

Advanced book-and-claim platforms like the SAFc Registry build customer confidence in certificate integrity through transparent procedures and by deploying blockchain to automate major parts of the process, track the value chain, and preclude database tampering. However, concerns remain about the reliability of underlying data inputs, and the complexity of registry operations hampers easy monitoring. This is where Verified Compute Cloud comes in, a high-impact tool to boost certificate integrity and stakeholder confidence by exploiting another blockchain functionality: abstracting complexity. Verified Compute Cloud uses distributed, blockchain-secured computation to eliminate the “black boxes” that exist within registries, conducting checks and validations on critical operations like certificate issuance, transfer, and retirement. Unlike the traditional annual, limited sample-based audits, these data and logic assessments are automated and continuous, running 24/7 to flag potential concerns with certificate quality in real-time and de-risk procurement.

Importantly, these validations are also publicly visible, enabling easy monitoring through the intuitive Verified Compute Cloud Data Explorer, which shows the full history scan of validations for any certificate. With Verified Compute Cloud, companies can tell the complete story of any emissions reduction claim. Imagine if sustainability report filings stopped being dry, static PDF files, and instead became interactive reports allowing users to to trace climate impact all the way downstream to an airline ticket. Readers could see the exact moment in time when an emissions claim originated, view proof that carbon savings haven’t been double counted, and validate the certificate retirement and claiming processes. This is the future we’re unlocking with Verified Compute: a new paradigm for customer confidence and corporate sustainability.

How it Works: Your Cloud with Your Logic

Verified Compute Cloud can be integrated into any book-and-claim registry in two steps. First, the registry management defines a list of data inputs and internal computations to be verified. Using the Energy Web Marketplace, they then register their solution with a defined verification scope and select a number of distributed verifiers. These are an independent, distributed network of computers (“nodes”) termed Verified Compute Cloud Operators that validate data and execute computations in parallel to the Registry Administrator. When these nodes reach consensus on the accuracy of a registry operation, this attestation is logged on the EWX blockchain, creating a digital audit trail that is viewable in the Verified Compute Cloud Data Explorer. The explorer may be public (revealing results while not disclosing sensitive private data) or private to registry administrators, as preferred.

To reduce any currency volatility related to payments while benefiting from smart contract service automation, Verified Compute Cloud Operators are compensated for their verification service in a stablecoin like USDC. These node operators can be legal entities or individuals — the choice is open to clients procuring the computing service. To ensure accountability, they stake Energy Web Token (EWT), EWX’s native token, and in case they malperform, this stake is “slashed”, or forfeited in whole or part. This carrot-and-stick mechanism facilitates a performance assurance for this decentralised digital service. Additional network and solution security is provided by small participants who are given an opportunity to support real-life decarbonisation by staking their EWT. Importantly, this distributed computation service can be performed on encrypted data, further preserving data privacy and integrity.

While Verified Compute Cloud includes several underlying, advanced technical components, the experience for registries is as simple as setting up and contracting for any other standard cloud service.

Verified Compute Cloud Pilot Use Case: Live Audit of the SAFc Registry

Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud is piloted through the SAFc Registry Verified Data Explorer, allowing the public to validate whether critical steps in the certificate retirement process have been executed correctly. This live, continuous audit empowers registry users and environmentally engaged citizens to answer the following questions based on independently verified information:

  1. Calculating Impact: How many tonnes of CO2e are abated by this certificate? What reduction in emissions does the underlying SAF represent, relative to conventional jet fuel?
  2. Preventing Duplicate Claims: Has this certificate been previously claimed in the registry?
  3. Confirming Rulebook Compliance: Does this certificate retirement have a valid beneficiary type, claim year, and disclosed production and blending dates? Is the retirement date valid?
Figure 2: Sustainable Aviation Fuel Registry Verified Data Explorer, powered by Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud, https://verify.safcregistry.org

We invite anyone interested in how the registry operates to explore these validations at verify.safcregistry.org — click here to learn more!

Energy Web Verified Compute Cloud can enhance the integrity of sustainability claims for any type of commodity or service, including freight and transport services, low-carbon commodities like steel and concrete, digital assets, or electricity. Today, as we celebrate the achievements of the SAFc Registry with our partners, we also look forward to extending this solution to accelerate decarbonisation in other domains.

Energy Web implements continuous live verification for the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAFc)… was originally published in Energy Web on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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