New standard increases transparency on energy origin for consumers

The new standard extends the scope of the earlier version, EN 16325:2013+A1:2015 ‘Guarantees of Origin related to energy – Guarantees of origin for electricity,’ to cover other energy carriers like gas, including hydrogen, as well as heating and cooling, to ensure that it fulfils the requirements of the Renewable Energy Directive (EU) 2023/2413, the Directive on common rules for the internal market for electricity (EU) 2019/944, the Directive on Energy Efficiency (EU) 2023/1791, and other relevant European legislation.

The aim of the standard is to create an accurate, reliable and fraud-resistant transferable Guarantees of Origin (GO) system that can be used to facilitate disclosing the origin of energy to final energy customers.

The standard provides rules across the entire process: from account holder registration and production device registration to GO issuing, GO transfer, and GO cancellation. The standard complies with the key requirements of accuracy, reliability, veracity, transparency, traceability, and fraud resistant procedures, with the aim of building trust and integrity in the market.

The standard matches the needs of:

• Final customers, allowing them to claim the origin of the renewable energy supplied to them;
• Suppliers of electricity, gases and heating and cooling to use a standardized GO framework to prove the renewable share in their energy mix and in the energy supplied to specific customers under renewable energy supply contracts;
• Policy makers to support GOs market development for different energy carriers across EU Member States;
• Financial institutions and banks to have an additional tool to evaluate the financing of renewable energy projects.

JTC 14 wishes to thank all WG 5 participants for developing the standard, including Ettore Piantoni, JTC 14 Chair, and Giuseppe Pinna, JTC 14 Secretariat.

For further information, contact Carolina Müller.