Executive Summary

The landscape of corporate decarbonization is rapidly evolving beyond traditional annual matching frameworks. Driven by stakeholder demands for greater credibility and demonstrable environmental impact, leading organizations are pursuing two primary advanced strategies: 24/7 Carbon-Free Electricity (CFE), which requires matching consumption with CFE generation on an hourly basis, and Emissionality (or Net-Impact), which focuses on maximizing avoided grid emissions by strategically timing clean energy delivery.¹ Energy storage, particularly utility-scale battery systems, is indispensable for achieving both objectives by enabling the temporal shifting of energy. However, a critical market gap exists: current Energy Attribute Certificate (EAC) systems, including Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and Guarantees of Origin (GOs), lack a standardized, transparent, and tradable mechanism to account for the time-shifting service provided by storage.⁵ This forces reliance on complex, bespoke storage tolling agreements or opaque internal tracking, hindering scalability, market liquidity, and auditability.⁹

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STAR Overview</a>

To address this deficiency, Granular Registry proposes a two-layer market infrastructure built upon its Granular Registry. The Granular Registry serves as the foundation, converting conventional MWh-based RECs into hourly Granular Certificates (GCs) that retain all source attributes while adding a precise timestamp compliant with the EnergyTag standard.² Layered upon this is the introduction of Storage Time Allocation Records (STARs), a novel, tradable environmental commodity issued via the Granular Registry to registered energy storage operators. STARs provide a verifiable, standardized record of the energy time-shifting service, capturing charging inputs, discharging outputs, and associated round-trip efficiency losses under a robust First-In-First-Out (FIFO) allocation model.

The mechanism involves pairing a purchased STAR with a corresponding GC. Both instruments are then retired within the Granular Registry to generate a final, non-tradable Storage-Discharge Granular Certificate (SD-GC). The SD-GC inherits the attributes of the original GC but carries an updated timestamp reflecting the discharge hour, along with immutable provenance data linking it back to the specific STAR and storage event. This process serves both primary decarbonization strategies:

• 24/7 CFE: Buyers acquire STARs to shift surplus GCs from hours of oversupply (e.g., midday solar) to cover consumption during deficit hours (e.g., evening peaks), achieving verifiable hourly matching without assuming storage operational risk.
• Emissionality: Buyers utilize the STAR's linkage between charge and discharge times, potentially combined with Marginal Emissions Rate (MER) data, to quantify and claim the enhanced carbon impact achieved by shifting clean energy into periods with higher emissions on the grid.

STARs offer significant advantages over traditional storage tolling agreements by commoditizing the time-shifting attribute, thereby simplifying contracts, transferring operational and market risks from the attribute buyer to the storage operator, and enabling a liquid, scalable, and transparent market analogous to existing REC markets.

This whitepaper provides a comprehensive technical overview of the STAR mechanism. It details the data architecture within the Granular Registry, the operational rules governing STAR issuance and retirement (including FIFO allocation and loss accounting), and the methods for integrating with legacy REC systems. It explores the application of STARs in achieving 24/7 CFE and emissionality goals, supported by illustrative examples. Furthermore, it outlines the benefits for various market stakeholders and presents a roadmap for market integration and adoption, positioning STARs as the critical missing link needed to fully unlock and value the temporal flexibility of energy storage in the transition to a decarbonized power grid.