RESOURCES
Guides, glossary, and field notes.
CFE Certificates and 24/7 CFE bring their own vocabulary. This page collects the terms and reading worth knowing before your first procurement conversation.
FIELD NOTES
Recent thinking from the CFE Energy team
GUIDE
Annual vs. hourly matching, in one worked example
A single site's certificate portfolio, matched both ways, to show exactly where the numbers diverge and why.
EXPLAINER
Reading a CFE Certificate matching claim
What "80% matched, hourly, intra-zone" actually commits a company to — and what it doesn't.
CASE NOTE
Sizing storage against an hourly gap, not an annual one
Why the shape of your unmatched hours matters more than the total for procurement decisions.
GLOSSARY
Terms worth knowing
| CFE Certificate | An Energy Attribute Certificate issued for generation in a window of one hour or less, carrying time, location, and technology data so it can be matched against consumption at the same resolution. |
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| 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy (24/7 CFE) | A procurement goal in which every hour of a buyer's electricity consumption is matched with carbon-free generation in the same hour and region, rather than matched on an annual average. |
| Energy Attribute Certificate (EAC) | The umbrella term for instruments — including RECs and Guarantees of Origin — that certify a unit of electricity came from a particular generation source. |
| Guarantee of Origin (GO) | The European equivalent of a REC: an EAC confirming the renewable or low-carbon origin of a unit of electricity, typically issued annually. |
| Temporal matching | Matching consumption to generation within a defined time interval — the tighter the interval, the stronger the claim. |
| Geographic (locational) matching | Requiring that matched generation could physically deliver to the consumption point, typically enforced at the bidding-zone level. |
| Bidding zone | A geographic area within which electricity can be freely traded without transmission constraints — commonly used as the deliverability boundary for locational matching. |
| Additionality | A requirement that matched generation comes from new capacity, rather than existing assets already on the grid, so that a claim reflects genuinely new clean supply. |
| 24/7 CFE Compact | A United Nations-backed initiative building demand and policy support for hourly-matched carbon-free electricity procurement. CFE Energy is working toward becoming a signatory. |
| GHG Protocol Scope 2 | The corporate accounting standard governing how purchased electricity emissions are reported; its current market-based method allows annual matching, with hourly matching under discussion for a future revision. |
Want the full standards documents?
We can walk your team through the CFE Energy Standard and Matching Framework directly, alongside how our platform implements them.