The RCC Standard
The normative rulebook for independent, per-job provenance of compute's embedded carbon and water: what is measured, how it is attributed and certified, how the record is made self-verifiable and tamper-evident, how double-counting is prevented, and how an eligible window mints a Renewable Compute Credit.
Status legend
Decided; do not re-litigate.
A proposed default; flag before building load-bearing logic on it.
Routed to the research agenda, often needing external authority.
The unit and quantification
Canonical definitionsettled
The RCC is a direct renewable-energy-certificate analog: generation produces a certificate; clean, water-passing compute produces a credit. The GPU-hour is the headline unit. Hardware type and form factor are mandatory certificate attributes, and no cross-hardware fungibility is asserted; the energy consumed is recorded alongside each credit as a measured normalization basis.
The issuance boundarysettled
The job is the issuance and provenance boundary. A job that runs forty clean, water-passing GPU-hours mints forty credits, backed by that job's composite provenance record. Carbon is the denominator that sets the count; water is a qualifying gate that changes eligibility, not the count.
Eligibility: what makes a GPU-hour mintable
Clean-window eligibility, inheritedsettled
A window is a clean window when its electricity consumption is matched to a retired granular certificate for that window: temporal match, regional deliverability, and retired exactly once. Cleanliness is born at the generator and carried by that certificate; the RCC references it and does not re-issue it. In the v1 reference implementation the granular certificate is stubbed and windows are detected by a grid carbon-intensity threshold (≤100 gCO₂/kWh, anchored to the EU-taxonomy low-carbon line). This replaces an earlier wind-plus-solar-share cutoff, which was not grid-neutral. The same threshold yields opposite verdicts across grids by design: MISO Central clears it almost never, a hydro grid almost always. The difference is policy, not technology.
Water gate, originated and qualifyingsettled
The executing facility must stay at or under a per-window, WUE-derived water threshold. Indirect water (the water consumed generating the electricity, via grid-mix water-consumption factors against the live feed) is computed from real data now. Direct and cooling water is modeled from published WUE benchmarks until a facility pilot meters it; every record flags which inputs are measured and which are modeled. Reservoir net evaporation is included at a conservative net factor, because the meter carries one water-factor table on every grid and lets the grid mix, not a per-grid rule, do the talking. The realized MISO Central basis is about 313 gallons per megawatt-hour. The cooling-mix fractions are measured from EIA-860 (2024 cooling codes) crossed with EIA-923 (2024 net generation) over the MISO Central footprint. The proposed threshold anchor is an industry-average WUE benchmark; the exact bar is a policy decision for a certification body.provisional
The double-counting firewall
Everything an RCC claims sits on one side of a single line. The inherited attribute, that a job ran on renewable energy, is born at the generator and already carried by its certificate; the RCC references the retired certificate and does not re-claim the energy attribute. The originated attributes, which the operator creates and the generator cannot issue, are the timing (shifting compute into clean windows), the restraint (holding through dirty, peak, or over-water windows), the water provenance, and the job-level granularity. Because the underlying certificate is retired exactly once and the RCC references rather than re-issues it, double-counting is prevented structurally, not by attestation.settled
Issuance, serialization, retirement
The RCC follows the renewable-energy-certificate lifecycle. On a job's completion, one credit is issued per certified GPU-hour, each with a unique identifier. Credits are serialized in a thin RCC ledger that Aquadrio owns, the system of record for the new attribute, referencing the retired granular certificate held in an external energy-attribute registry. A given GPU-hour, and the certificate it references, can back exactly one RCC, enforced in the ledger. Transfer and retirement semantics mirror certificate retirement and are exercised when a holder or retirer persona exists.settled
Claims, and the honest-framing guardrails
An RCC may make the comparative claim that this compute was produced more cleanly, with accounted water, than uncertified compute, backed by traceable, hashed provenance, plus the attribute claims of certified timing, evidenced restraint, per-job water provenance, and hardware typing. It may not claim to be first to measure or schedule clean compute: software carbon intensity already measures it, and grid-responsive scheduling is commercialized. It may not claim "compute as currency" as original, may not re-claim the inherited energy attribute, and may not assert real-time operation where the grid feed is delayed. On securities discipline: an RCC offered before a market exists is a forward bet on future recognition; IPO or stock framing is not used, speculative-value language is constrained, and legal review is required before any external offering.settledopen
Verification and assurance
Any holder can independently check an RCC today: recompute the carbon from the recorded inputs, confirm the water figures and their measured-or-modeled flags, and confirm the referenced certificate serial is retired and bound to no other claim. The sha256 hash detects tampering. The standard is published as an open draft and designed to be recognizable by an accreditation of issuers and verifiers and a product certification; it claims no third-party certification it has not received.
Changelog
v0.1, July 2026Initial open draft. Defines the RCC attribute class, the two eligibility gates, the double-counting firewall, the issuance and verification lifecycle, and the permitted and prohibited claims.
Clean-window gate stated as grid carbon intensity at or under 100 gCO₂/kWh, replacing the earlier renewable-share proxy (retained only as an informational statistic). Indirect-water basis reconciled to about 313 gallons per megawatt-hour, hydro net reservoir evaporation included.