How Bundling RECs and Carbon Offsets Can Support Your Energy Strategy

If you’re managing energy procurement for your organization, you may also be tasked with showing emissions progress while navigating costs, contracts, and reporting nuances — often with limited time and resources.

Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and carbon offsets are two tools organizations often use to support emissions goals without overhauling their broader energy strategy. When they are bundled into your power and gas contracts rather than purchased separately, they can be easier to manage, easier to report on, and easier to adjust over time.

To see how that can work in practice, it helps to take a closer look at how these tools work.

A Renewable Energy Certificate represents one MWh of electricity generated from a renewable source such as wind or solar.

When an organization purchases RECs, it’s matching some or all of its electricity use with renewable generation. The electricity flowing to a facility still comes from the shared grid, but RECs allow organizations to account for the renewable attributes of that power.

RECs are also flexible. An organization can match a portion of its usage or all of it, and it can adjust volume over time as goals, reporting needs, or budgets change.

Carbon offsets support projects like reforestation, methane capture, or carbon sequestration. When an organization or business purchases offsets, it’s funding verified emissions reductions or removals elsewhere to help account for emissions it cannot yet eliminate directly — especially those tied to natural gas use or other hard-to-abate operations.

The global voluntary carbon offset market is growing rapidly, with projections putting it on a path from roughly $4 billion in 2024 to as much as $24 billion by 2030.¹ Growth has also brought greater scrutiny around quality. High-rated offsets are now trading at more than three times the price of lower-rated ones, reflecting closer attention to what counts as a credible offset.²

Offsets do not replace direct emissions reductions. But for emissions that are not yet feasible to eliminate, they can be a practical way to support progress while longer-term changes take shape.

When RECs and carbon offsets are built into your electricity and/or natural gas contracts rather than managed separately, a few things often become simpler.

• Efficient contracting. Bundling can reduce the number of separate agreements, invoices, and administrative steps your team needs to manage.
• Streamlined reporting. Instead of pulling data from multiple vendors and reconciling different formats, organizations may be able to track energy usage and sustainability actions in the same place. That can decrease administrative work and make progress easier to communicate internally.
• More predictable costs. When sustainability costs are part of your energy contract, they can be budgeted alongside the rest of your energy spend instead of managed separately.
• Easier adjustments. Regulations change. Goals evolve. Your operations shift. A bundled approach lets you adjust the mix of RECs and offsets as your organization moves forward, without rebuilding the strategy from scratch.

For example, imagine an organization with multiple facilities, such as a manufacturer, school district, or nonprofit network. They might use RECs to help address electricity-related emissions across its footprint, while using offsets for emissions tied to natural gas use that are harder to reduce in the near term. Managing those pieces through a more integrated energy strategy can make the work easier to coordinate and report on.

RECs and carbon offsets can be useful tools, but they’re not a complete sustainability strategy on their own. Both depend on the quality of what’s being purchased, and both work best as part of a broader approach that may also include efficiency improvements, operational changes, and, when it makes sense, direct renewable energy investments.

No single tool solves everything on its own, but organizations don’t need to wait for a perfect solution to start moving forward. In many cases, credible progress is built step by step through a combination of actions that work together over time.

If your organization is evaluating whether bundling makes sense, here are a few useful starting points:

• Are sustainability actions and energy contracts managed separately? If so, your team may be spending more time on coordination than necessary.
• Can your current approach to emissions reduction be explained clearly and quickly? If you’re reliant on multiple vendors, spreadsheets, and reporting formats, consolidation may help.
• Is there room to adjust your strategy as needs change? As reporting expectations evolve, a bundled approach may be easier to adapt than a patchwork of separate agreements.
• Are you confident in the quality of the RECs and offsets you’re purchasing? Not all offsets are created equal, and not all underlying credits meet the same standards.

Sustainability programs are often easier to manage when they’re built into how an organization already buys and manages energy, rather than bolted on as a separate initiative. Bundling RECs and offsets with a power and gas strategy is one way to do that.

The right energy partner understands more than electricity and gas supply alone. They can help evaluate the right energy supply mix for where an organization is today, explain tradeoffs clearly, and adjust the approach as needs change.

Bringing sustainability and energy strategy into the same conversation can be a practical place to start — when was the last time yours were reviewed together?

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¹ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/voluntary-carbon-credit-market-report#:~:text=The%20global%20voluntary%20carbon%20credit,that%20cannot%20be%20fully%20eliminated.

² https://www.regreener.earth/blog/carbon-credit-prices-today-trends-and-forecasts-for-2026