Meta quietly left RE100 today, the corporate club where companies pledge to source 100% renewable electricity and get a badge for it. Meta helped make that badge mean something: it’s been one of the biggest buyers of wind and solar on the planet, PPAs stacked on PPAs, whole solar farms built basically to keep its servers humming. So the exit isn’t really a renewables story. It’s an accounting story.

RE100’s rule is strict: renewable, and only renewable, counted against your actual annual load. What it doesn’t let you count is nuclear, or gas with carbon capture, or a lot of the “firm” power hyperscalers are now chasing to keep AI training runs from stuttering when the wind doesn’t blow. GE Vernova’s gas turbine backlog sits at 116 gigawatts, booking 2031 delivery slots. PG&E says it’s fielding a 12.7 GW data center pipeline and has started getting choosy about which ones it takes. Somewhere in that math, a company that needs power on demand, every hour, forever, starts finding a 100% renewable pledge less like a badge and more like a fence.

I don’t think this means Meta buys less solar next year. It probably means Meta stops explaining its gas and nuclear deals to a nonprofit that won’t count them, since the turbines were always the real constraint, not the pledge. It just took this long for the hardware to become the more honest signal of what these companies actually need. Funny how the exit from a climate club can be the most climate-relevant thing that happens all week.

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