Carbon Accounting That Helps Companies Shift to Clean Energy Faster

The briefing distinguishes between attributional accounting, which allocates emissions responsibility, and consequential assessment, which estimates how specific corporate actions change total greenhouse gas emissions. It argues that while attributional reporting is necessary for inventories, it fails to quantify real-world abatement or value actions like grid storage. By adopting modernized consequential methods, companies can prioritize interventions—such as siting solar projects in coal-heavy regions—that drive faster grid decarbonization.

• Current attributional (inventory-based) accounting is designed to allocate emissions responsibility but does not measure the actual climate impact of corporate actions. Consequently, reductions in a company's reported emissions inventory may not correspond to real-world greenhouse gas abatement, and certain beneficial actions, such as investments in stand-alone grid storage or projects in geographies outside a company's operations, are not reflected in these inventories.
• Consequential accounting estimates how total greenhouse gas emissions change as a result of a specific action by comparing the outcome to a counterfactual scenario where the action did not occur. In the electricity sector, this involves analyzing how an action changes both the operations of the grid (e.g., power plants operating at higher capacity factors to meet new load) and the overall structure of the grid (e.g., new capacity accelerating the retirement of fossil assets).
• Consequential assessment can identify more effective decarbonization strategies that attributional accounting treats as identical. For example, two identical solar power purchase agreements (PPAs) in Pennsylvania would provide the same energy attribute certificates under attributional rules, but a consequential assessment would likely show that a project located in a coal-heavy region has a greater carbon impact than one in a gas-rich region.
• Widespread adoption of consequential assessment requires overcoming several challenges: modernizing calculation methods and datasets for affordable corporate reporting, reaching a consensus on how to present impact claims to the public, and demonstrating the feasibility of these methods to practitioners.

APA

RMI (2025). Carbon Accounting That Helps Companies Shift to Clean Energy Faster. https://rmi.org/resources/carbon-accounting-that-helps-companies-shift-to-clean-energy-faster/

Chicago

RMI. Carbon Accounting That Helps Companies Shift to Clean Energy Faster. 2025. https://rmi.org/resources/carbon-accounting-that-helps-companies-shift-to-clean-energy-faster/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=Carbon Accounting That Helps Companies Shift to Clean Energy Faster |date=22 April 2025 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/carbon-accounting-that-helps-companies-shift-to-clean-energy-faster/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2025carbon, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{Carbon Accounting That Helps Companies Shift to Clean Energy Faster}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2025}, month = apr, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/carbon-accounting-that-helps-companies-shift-to-clean-energy-faster/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }