Hourly tracking is quickly becoming essential for keeping billions of dollars in carbon-free energy investments moving and achieving next-generation climate goals. Today, LevelTen Energy announces the first awardees of the Registry Acceleration Fund: four pioneering organizations — Evident, Grexel Systems, Unicorn Systems, and Xpansiv — whose registries collectively issue or track more than 2,000 TWh of certificates across over 70 countries for more than 35,000 account holders. The upgrades will make verified, hour-by-hour carbon-free energy available worldwide, turning pent-up demand into real transactions.
Meeting Clear and Growing Demand for Granular Certificates
Energy attribute certificate (EAC) registries play a critical role in building a carbon-free grid by creating, transferring, and retiring proof that clean electricity was generated in the exact hour and location it was produced. They are crucial to providing the market instruments necessary to optimize procurement and verify that energy is truly clean on a granular level, every hour of the day, in the specific locations that matter to an organization’s strategy, worldwide.
The market is ready. Our 2025 GC Market Readiness Report shows that advanced clean energy buyers who rely on bundled EACs indicated a willingness to retire 71% of their EAC portfolio as hourly granular certificates as early as 2026 — equal to 17 TWh of fresh demand in just the next 18 months. This is a powerful signal that EAC issuing bodies and registry operators cannot ignore.
To meet that demand, LevelTen Energy launched the Registry Acceleration Fund (RAF) last year, backed by the Granular Certificate Trading Alliance, to modernize registry infrastructure, close the gap between interest and transactions, and accelerate progress towards granular accounting of carbon-free energy (CFE).
"We are developing a next-generation registry for our customers with expansion of our support for granularity as a core pillar, while ensuring interoperability with our existing services and partners," says Travis Caddy, Business Development Director at Evident. "Funds from the RAF will accelerate our timeline for this development significantly, allowing us to deliver this additional suite of services to our global customers as their requirements evolve."
The Vision, and Why it Matters
As we work towards launching the Granular Certificate Marketplace, we’ve consistently heard from customers and industry stakeholders that the availability of granular procurement options globally is critical to enabling advanced clean energy goals. Modernizing existing registries with hourly capabilities provides the foundation needed to support widespread availability of GCs. This hourly granularity is particularly important for integrating variable renewable resources, energy storage, and clean, firm power onto the grid, driving more clean energy integration and enabling credible claims that buyers are matching their physical operations with clean power. It’s directly aligned with the GC Trading Alliance’s vision to enable GC trading, ensure the environmental legitimacy of GC trades, and provide price transparency on where and when clean energy is most needed.
"Our mission with Certigy has always been to deliver best-in-class EAC registry software that supports the future of transparent, reliable, and efficient renewable energy markets.," says Filip Král, Head of Stream at Unicorn Systems. "The award from the Registry Acceleration Fund will help us accelerate the development of our platform even further and continue providing cutting-edge solutions for registries and market participants worldwide."
The Registry Acceleration Fund was designed to enable existing EAC registries, registry software providers, and other key players to modernize infrastructure to support hourly certificate tracking. We asked applicants to touch on their ability to support new data infrastructure, implement the EnergyTag API standard, ensure interoperability with other market participants, support storage tracking functionality, and address how they would design or preserve a user experience that allows registry users to have choice in how they manage EACs on an hourly or monthly level. Applicants were evaluated based on their experience, as well as the coverage areas, resource-effectiveness, and timeline feasibility of their proposals. Adherence to industry standards, such as the EnergyTag GC scheme and Registry API were also considered.
The Strength of Industry Innovation: Announcing Round 1 Awardees
Round 1 drew 19 high-caliber proposals from registries and software providers worldwide. After a rigorous review, we advanced the four projects with the clearest, fastest path to impact. Collectively, the four awardees oversee registry platforms that already manage more than 2 billion megawatt hours of certificates each year. Upgrading those systems will allow additional issuing bodies to unlock hourly capabilities and create a global pathway for buyers to act on the 71% demand signal.
Congratulations to our inaugural awardees, Evident, Grexel Systems, Unicorn Systems, and Xpansiv Limited. Here’s a closer look at the work these four organizations are pursuing:
Congratulations to our RAF Round 1 awardees. Thank you for your commitment and efforts in building the essential infrastructure for a more transparent — and ultimately decarbonized — energy system. To every applicant, your insight and ambition moved this process forward. Together, we are building the future of carbon-free energy.
Building the Global Infrastructure for GC Trading
The Registry Acceleration Fund is a key component needed to enable robust, widespread GC trading and support the transition to a greener future.
"Until we can track carbon-free energy at all hours worldwide, we won’t be able to achieve a carbon-free grid,” says Katie Soroye, VP of Granular Procurement at LevelTen. “Registries are crucial to expanding hourly tracking. These RAF-funded upgrades let us run a parallel path: launching the GC Marketplace while laying the foundation for additional hourly market readiness across more regions.”
Registry operators share that sense of acceleration:
“Making significant changes to EAC issuance typically requires public funding or funding from registry users, which makes changes such as introducing granularity a lengthy process,” says Markus Klimscheffskij, CEO at Grexel Systems. “The RAF funding significantly lowers the threshold for going granular, and accelerates our pilot project to issue hourly guarantees of origin (GOs) in Ireland.”
“We issued our first granular (hourly) RECs in 2022, and are pleased to extend our work in this space,” says Katie Doyle, Senior Vice President, Registries at Xpansiv. “The Registry Acceleration Fund award allows us to expand on existing capabilities, accelerate upgrades needed, and deliver GCs in more service areas.”
What's Next?
Round 1 is only the beginning. We are deeply committed to continuing our support for granular capabilities and registry modernization and invite further collaboration from across the industry. We are currently taking applications for the Registry Acceleration Fund’s Round 2 Request for Proposals through July 11. If you have a project you'd like to tell us about, please don't hesitate to send an email to RAFresponses@leveltenenergy.com.
