Modernising EAC Management: From Spreadsheets to Smart Software

The reality of EAC management today

In most electricity supply businesses today, EAC portfolio management is still run on spreadsheets. It's a process that is slow, error-prone, and highly dependent on individual expertise. Knowledge is often siloed with a single portfolio manager, making collaboration and oversight difficult.

These managers are largely focused on ensuring certificates are in place and ready for cancellation in the relevant registry. What they are not typically doing is allocating certificates to customers in real-time. So when a customer asks – sometimes months later – how their electricity was sourced, the supplier must dig back through the data to piece the story together. It’s labour-intensive and inefficient.

A new way forward with EAC portfolio management for ‘downstream’

We started our business by providing expertise and software tools to enable hourly matching tariffs, on the back of the existing EAC certificates and schemes. While developing those solutions, it became apparent that our customers and prospects were also looking for tools to manage their EACs, as they exist today, even without the added granularity. So we built more features to tackle those needs. We provide an independent layer of software to complement the registry operations, providing a middle ground between the registry and the business operations. Our goal is simple: to remove manual effort, improve transparency, and empower suppliers to deliver a better service to their customers.

We offer an end-to-end EAC risk & portfolio management tool. In this blog we’ll cover how our solution supports ‘downstream’ portfolio managers that have a customer-facing need:

1. Clarity across the portfolio

We offer a consolidated view of the entire EAC position – including certificates from owned assets and those procured on the market. Portfolio managers can explore their holdings in depth, track deliveries and expiry dates, technology types, volumes, and more.

2. Customer-focused structure

Our platform maps the supplier’s portfolio, namely their customer structure, revealing the relationships between meters and end users, how those users group into larger accounts, and how these connections relate to tariffs and product structures. This provides full visibility into individual customer requirements and enables more strategic management of certificate needs.

3. Tailored certificate allocation

For each supplier we work with, we build a bespoke allocation algorithm. This model matches available EACs to customer needs based on predefined priorities and customer portfolio structure – such as technology preferences, carbon intensity, or temporal matching – ensuring a logical and transparent allocation process.

4. Automated, insightful reporting

Once allocations are in place, we issue certificate cancellation instructions to perform in the registry. While in some cases this process can be fully integrated (for countries where registries have the tech backbone to do so), in other cases we prepare cancellation instructions to carry out in the registry. Our system then produces detailed customer reports – without requiring hours spent navigating registries. Reports are individual to each end consumers, and can include certificate IDs, source technologies, carbon intensity data, asset maps, and other relevant insights, helping customers better understand and demonstrate their electricity sourcing impact.

Trusted by suppliers

Our solution is already being used by forward-thinking energy suppliers including npower Business Solutions, Smartest Energy, and Drax in the UK, and more beyond such as PPC in Greece and JERA Cross in Japan. We’re helping teams streamline internal processes, reduce time spent on manual tasks, and offer a more sophisticated experience to customers.

Anton Roberts, Commercial & Transformation Director at TotalEnergies Gas & Power said “since adopting the Granular Energy platform, we can offer customers increased information and traceability. Using the platform has led to a significant reduction in the time required to manage the certificate portfolio, meaning we can focus on improving customer propositions.”

Building the future of certificate management

As expectations for transparency in renewable energy sourcing continue to grow, now is the time to modernise how certificates are managed. At Granular Energy, we’re here to support energy suppliers as they navigate that journey – solving today’s administrative challenges, while preparing tomorrow’s demand for real-time matching.

To cover the full EAC lifecycle, we’re expanding our platform to risk management and trading. This means our software is now helping traders manage their EAC book, with features for certificate deal logging and delivery tracking, showing consolidated view of certificates across registries, all together providing full position management services.