There is no doubt about it: Google has been a disruptive force on the Internet and it’s now leading the evolution across the electric system in America and the world. Google’s strategy for greening its data centers sets the stage “Let’s say it’s 2009. You’re a global technology company, and you need very large amounts of renewable energy. How do you get it? Ideally you would just buy it from your local utility. But you can’t, at least not yet”.

Now let’s say it’s March of 2019; has the situation improved much for the Google of 2019 in their ability to secure green power where it’s needed and when it’s needed. Sadly, the situation is only marginally better than in 2009, when I was a Software Architect for ISO New England’s Forward Capacity Market Clearing Engine. As Google so eloquently points out “Google can’t buy clean energy from our utilities because of regulatory restrictions on our retail contract, and we can’t produce nearly enough of it behind the meter at our data center facilities because of physical and geographical restrictions. But we can buy it at the wholesale level directly from developers on the same grids where we operate our data centers .”

If only this statement were true, but even in 2019 the wholesale capacity markets aren’t designed to allow this type of transactional exchange between green buyers and green capacity sellers. As ISO New England’s CEO Gordon van Welie pointed out in an article titled Region’s electricity market in trouble from November 2018: “The existing market has one objective, which is to provide reliable electricity at the least possible cost, van Welie says. That’s all this market does. It doesn’t incorporate an environmental objective.”

However, there is a spark of hope that the pressures coming from States and Green Buyers, such as Google, to have choices in buying their electricity, will produce positive changes in wholesale capacity markets. One proposal in particular, called the “Always on Capacity Exchange” (AOCE pronounced ACE), is under development for consideration as a standard for energy capacity within NAESB and possible adoption by FERC as a future regulation, similar to the OASIS NAESB standard that has been in force for over 10 years as a FERC regulation to manage Transmission Capacity. A NAESB standards development process implements the ANSI standards development methodology and is very similar to the IETF consensus based approach. Green buyers are encouraged to participate in the development of any future NAESB standard and are encouraged to show their support for a new approach to energy capacity acquisition by adding a comment showing their support.