Carbon Credits Helped Power the “100% Clean” Olympic Winter Games
- Enel powered the Winter Olympics with “100% low-carbon electricity,” but relied partly on carbon credits.
- Carbon offsets allow companies to claim clean energy use without physically consuming only renewables.
- Enel plans €53 billion in investments through 2028, including €20 billion for wind and solar.
The Winter Olympics are over, but their energy supplier, Enel, is rightly proud of the feat it pulled off: 100% low-carbon electricity supply for the games. But there is a twist. That 100% was only possible thanks to one thing: carbon credits.
The energy major reported it was supplying 85 GW of electricity to the Olympics and Paralympics, yet not all of those gigawatts came from wind and solar installations. Some of them did, but the rest came from baseload generation facilities, “cleaned up” with so-called “guarantee of origin” certificates.
Every GO certificate corresponds to 1 MWh of electricity produced from low-carbon sources except nuclear. The electricity itself is not necessarily supplied to the buyer of the certificates. The certificates are there to prove it was generated, theoretically offsetting the high-carbon electricity that the buyer had to use to ensure supply reliability.
Enel this week announced it was going to spend some 53 billion euros in fresh investments between this year and 2028, of which 20 billion was on wind and solar growth. The goal of the company is to add some 15 GW of new capacity, mainly in Europe. It seems Enel would rather generate its own low-carbon electricity than buy certificates—and there is a good reason for this.
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Carbon certificates, or carbon credits, or carbon offsets all amount to the same idea: buying a modern version of a Medieval indulgence to clean up, in the modern case, your energy supply track record. Indeed, the operators of wind and solar installations make good business selling such certificates to other companies, including Big Tech, which, until about last year, was willing to pay anything to such operators to be able to show its investors that almost all of its electricity comes from low-carbon generation, even though that is not, in physical reality, the case.
In addition to wind and solar certificates, there have been a multitude of projects promising to offset a certain amount of emissions through, for example, tree-planting or nature conservation. Carbon offsets were viewed as a promising new market set to grow substantially amid the global transition push—until investigations revealed that there was little substance to the claims made by carbon offsetters.
The revelations made by these investigations cooled the enthusiasm about carbon offsets, tightened oversight and accountability standards, and shrank the offsets market. To add insult to injury, climate activists themselves are against offsets. Their argument is that buying carbon certificates does not lead to actual, physical reduction in the consumption of crude oil and natural gas, and they are absolutely right, which is what makes the analogy with indulgences so accurate.
Just how difficult it is to power everything with just wind and solar—literally, not with certificates—becomes clear from Enel’s very own annual report. In it, the company boasted that as much as 66% of the electricity it generated in 2025 came from low-carbon sources—but half of that was hydropower, 17% was geothermal, and only 10% came from wind and solar. Hydropower is, of course, very low-carbon, but it is rarely in the spotlight, unlike wind and solar, which attract most of the investments and sell most of the certificates, not least because in Europe, there is now a political push against new hydropower and even for the dismantling of existing facilities to restore rivers.
Enel this week said it had struck a deal to acquire 830 MW in wind and solar capacity in the United States. One might argue that buying wind and solar in the United States right now is a bit risky, to put it mildly, but Enel has prioritized expanding specifically its wind and solar asset portfolio. Perhaps this has nothing at all to do with carbon certificates. Perhaps it does have something to do with it. The fact of these certificates, however, is more proof that the vision of a 100% wind and solar grid with some hydro and nuclear for diversity’s sake remains unrealistic.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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