Welcome to the first edition of Behind the Meter. Every couple of weeks I'll be sharing what's caught my attention in energy - the stuff that actually affects how we manage utilities, procure power, and report on it.
Let's go.
The Take
Hourly Matching Is Coming for Your Scope 2 Numbers
I've been watching the GHG Protocol's Scope 2 revision pretty closely, and I don't think enough people in this market are paying attention to it.
In January they closed the first public consultation on what amounts to the biggest change to Scope 2 reporting in twenty years. The short version: they want to move to hourly matching for market-based accounting, and they want to add deliverability requirements to certificates.
Think about what that does to the way most Australian organisations currently handle this. You buy a bunch of LGCs, you match them against your annual consumption, you report a market-based Scope 2 figure that looks great. The certificates don't need to line up with when you actually used the power, and nobody asks whether the generator could physically deliver to your site. It's a pretty loose system, and everyone knows it.
The proposed rules tighten that up considerably. Your certificates would need to match the hour you consumed. So a wind farm spinning at 2am doesn't cover your manufacturing load running flat out on a Tuesday afternoon. And there's a geographic piece too - the generation has to be on a grid that could realistically serve you.
Now, the final rules aren't expected until 2027. But here's what's been bugging me: contracts are being signed right now on the basis of annual matching. PPAs with 10-year terms. LGC purchase agreements. If you're an energy consultant putting clients into these deals, or a sustainability manager building a business case around them, you need to be thinking about whether the Scope 2 outcome your board expects will still be valid halfway through the contract.
This lands at an awkward time for Australian organisations too. The NGER market-based method just kicked in (voluntary from 2024-25, consistent application across all facilities required from 2025-26 if you opt in). ASRS mandatory disclosures are rolling out for Group 2 entities from July. Everything is tightening at once.
I keep coming back to the same thought: hourly matching is coming whether they finalise it next year or the year after. The direction is set. If you're not already thinking about interval data infrastructure and granular certificate tracking, you're going to be scrambling later. I'd rather build for it now.
Quick Hits
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Google just dropped a billion dollars on a 100-hour battery. Form Energy makes iron-air batteries. They store electricity by rusting iron, which sounds nuts until you see the economics: ~US$1B for a 300 MW system at a Google data centre. We're talking $20/kWh versus $150-200 for lithium. Most of the storage conversation in Australia is still about 2-4 hour lithium batteries, and that's fine for what it does, but it can't solve multi-day reliability gaps. If iron-air works at scale, and Google apparently thinks it will, the whole capacity adequacy picture in the NEM looks different. One to watch. (TechCrunch)
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The corporate PPA market just had its first bad year in a decade. Global volumes dropped 10% in 2025 according to BloombergNEF. 55.9 GW, down from 62 GW. But the number that really jumped out at me: four companies (Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft) made up 49% of all PPA activity. Unique buyers fell by half. The hyperscalers are still buying, everyone else is pulling back. APAC got hit hardest. If you're brokering C&I PPAs in Australia, the global trend line should give you pause. What happens when the big four have enough? (BloombergNEF)
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Home batteries are eating grid-scale returns alive. Grid-scale BESS capture rates in the NEM hit 52.8% in Q1, the lowest in over a year. The Cheaper Home Batteries Program has tripled installed home battery capacity to 6.4 GWh in six months, and all that distributed storage is compressing the price spreads that grid-scale operators depend on. Modo Energy reckons 4-hour spreads could fall 26% by 2030 if the trend continues. If you've got money in grid-scale storage or you're looking at BESS-backed hedging strategies, the assumptions from twelve months ago might already be stale. (Modo Energy)
From the blog: If the hourly matching piece above got you thinking, this one goes deeper on how both Scope 2 methods actually work under NGER, what the ASRS disclosures mean for your reporting, and what dual-method reporting looks like in practice. Useful reference ahead of the October 31 deadline. Read it →
That's the lot for Edition #1. If any of this sparked a thought, whether you agree, disagree, or want to argue about it, hit reply or find me on LinkedIn.
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— Cohen
If something in here sparked a thought, hit reply. I read every one.