As many readers will be aware, electricity purchases in Australia’s main grids are required to be covered by the surrender of renewable energy certificates. It’s currently 17.91% of energy purchases (Renewable Power Percentage-RPP) or 33,000 GWh per annum as per the Large-scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET).
Liable entities (energy retailers, generators and large electricity users) usually surrender Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGC’s) in February each year to meet their mandated target. There is also the opportunity to additionally surrender LGC’s outside of LRET, which is known as voluntary surrender, effectively meaning that those certificates are extinguished from the register and cannot be used again.
To take a snapshot of who is surrendering the most LGC’s we tallied all voluntary surrenders since the start of 2023. Voluntary surrender can be performed by any entity that has either created or purchased certificates from a renewable generator licensed under the scheme. Some of these surrendered certificates would cover retailers accredited for Greenpower (www.greenpower.gov.au) which has additional rules such as the timing of surrender and vintage, as well as exclusion of “old” hydro power, but the majority of these certificates can be surrendered by anyone, at any time. This means there is no obligation to surrender a specific volume at a specific time, which is why a multi-year analysis is better to capture a medium-term trend in voluntary surrender activity. These certificates cost real money, so surrendering means a financial commitment to supporting large scale renewable generation.
There were 148 entities that voluntarily surrendered LGC’s from 2023 until early March 2025, totaling 18m certificates or 18TWh of energy. To make this data easier to visualise, after calculating the top 20 contributors, we aggregated the remainder as government (state & councils), utilities (generators & retailers) and corporate (business, universities, NGO’s etc.).
The largest entity by a long way is the ACT government, surrendering 3.8m LGC’s and the 2nd largest group is aggregated corporates with 2.9m, with Origin Energy in 3rd place with 1.5m. Snowy Hydro with its Red Energy & Lumo retail businesses is 4th with 1.4m and governments other than the ACT are the 5th largest cohort with 1.2m surrendered. We have illustrated the top 20 contributors (making up around 13m or 72%) and the 3 groups for smaller contributors in government, utilities and corporates for the rest in figure1.
What we do not know is where some entities surrender on behalf of another electricity consumer i.e. it’s possible that a corporate might have or previously had a retailer surrender on behalf of them as well as surrendering on their own behalf. It would also be expected that the retailers surrender mostly on behalf of their customers as their own consumption of electricity is minimal outside of charging batteries and auxiliary power at power stations. We do not know from the data whether the voluntary surrender is minimally above the RPP or equivalent to as much as 100% or more of matched electricity consumption. It is simply a measure of how much renewable generation they’re paying for beyond the LRET.
Whilst the ACT government is making the largest commitment on behalf of Canberrans, it is encouraging that we also see corporates such as Amazon, Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and others making their own purchases and voluntary surrender of LGC’s to make commitments to the purchase of renewable energy in Australia. In some instances, these rival or exceed those made by some energy retailers on behalf of their own customers.