Inside Google’s 24/7 CFE Playbook: Hourly Tracking at Global Scale
Table Of Contents
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Background & Goal
Google operates one of the world’s largest always-on infrastructures across cloud regions, offices, and campuses. The company has set an ambitious goal of operating on 24/7 carbon-free energy (CFE) globally by 2030. To reach that goal, Google is expanding the use of Time-based Energy Attribute Certificates (T-EACs, also known as granular certificates) so clean energy generation and trading can be validated hourly across its portfolio.
The Challenge
To produce and use T-EACs at scale, Google needed to bring hourly metering data and energy attribute certificate records together in a single system. The data lived in many places and formats, with uneven integration options and manual steps that slowed quality assurance and reporting. The team was tasked to:
- Aggregate hourly consumption and clean generation data across countries and providers
- Normalize nonstandard schemas, identifiers, and file formats
- Capture issuance, transfer, and retirement events for EACs to support T-EAC creation
- Establish audit-ready lineage and reduce manual reconciliations
The Solution
Flexidao and Google partnered to map where data resides, automate secure collection, and model it for hourly analytics and T-EAC workflows. We combined existing integrations, Google BigQuery, and trusted emissions data to create a reliable pipeline from source systems to decision-ready dashboards.What the team gets
- Data access and discovery: Connect to national data hubs, utility systems, and grid operators where data is stored
- Automated ingestion: Build recurring pipelines with existing connectors and BigQuery for financial, volumetric, and operational data
- Hourly emissions context: Incorporate hourly emission factors from Electricity Maps
- Unified model and lineage: Standardize metering, contracts, and certificate events with traceable provenance
- Decision-ready views: Dashboards and KPIs for portfolio coverage, contract inventory, certificate status, and emissions reporting
Results
The collaboration began in 2021 with a pilot in Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands to verify 24/7 CFE tracking. Based on the pilot’s success, the work has expanded to digitize and automate hourly tracking and incorporate T-EACs across Google’s global CFE portfolio.
- Automation: Recurring, high-resolution data collection and quality checks with fewer manual interventions
- Centralization: Contracts, metering data, and certificates consolidated into one platform
- Visibility: Clear view of hours served by carbon-intensive electricity to guide procurement and siting decisions
- Scalability: A repeatable model for onboarding new regions, assets, and counterparties
“Flexidao has been a key collaborator on our journey, first piloting a digital solution to enable hourly clean energy validation for our facilities and now bringing this solution to scale. They are helping us accelerate our electricity management and verification process.”
