pv magazine: GHG Protocol uncertainty is cooling the solar corporate PPA market, says Renewabl CEO

Article summary

Corporate PPA volumes fell 10% in 2025, according to BloombergNEF, and pv magazine's Matthew Lynas asked Renewabl CEO JP Cerda why. His answer: uncertainty over the GHG Protocol's proposed Scope 2 update – which would move corporate clean power claims from annual to hourly matching – may be part of the reason buyers pause before signing.

"Corporates are kind of waiting on the final decision on the protocol to see what kind of rules are going to be imposed on them,"
_{– JP Cerda told pv magazine.}

The piece looks at what that pause means for solar. Annual matching has spent a decade rewarding whichever technology is cheapest to buy in volume, and in most of Europe that has been solar. JP Cerda argues that logic is wearing thin in markets where solar is already oversupplied.

Key points from the piece:

• A shift to hourly matching would require companies to show that consumption in a given hour is covered by generation certificates from that same hour – not simply matched over the year.
• Large generators, particularly offshore wind operators, are starting to sell "shaped" certificates that mimic other technologies' output profiles, adding competition for solar developers in wind-rich markets such as the UK.
• Battery storage is emerging as the mechanism that lets solar-plus-storage projects shift generation into the hours buyers actually need, and lets a storage operator resell coverage between oversupplied and deficit hours.

"The focus and the point of hourly matching is not to make things more expensive. It's basically making things more fair in the long run." He also repeated a line Renewabl uses often with buyers who assume hourly means all-or-nothing: "70% being the new 100%."
_{– JP Cerda, CEO at Renewabl}

For developers, Cerda's framing reads less as a warning and more as a redirect: solar-only, cross-border deals get harder to sell as the standard shifts, but that pushes value toward hybridisation, storage and shaped products rather than away from solar altogether. "Any time there's new legislation or new anything, there's always a panic for a few months and then people realise there's nothing to panic about and then markets go back to normal," he said.

Full article

Read the full article on pv magazine.

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