I can't help but feel that this article is burying the lede. According to FERC, Home Depot sold 'Environmental Attributes' to America Efficient, not mere sales data. 'Environmental Attributes' are intrinsic to the energy saving device, and it should not be possible to sell them separately without a contract with the consumers. Therefore, Home Depot themselves would appear to be heavily implicated - but the possibility is not discussed.

The energy savings were sold by HD twice - once to the customer (who pays a premium for less energy usage, and may also have claimed federal tax credits), and once more to America Efficient (who sold them to the state / grid operator non-profits).

It's an interesting kind of subsidy arbitrage - since businesses can benefit from subsidies that consumers cannot, it creates an incentive to carve out the subsidy-granting-essence from consumers sales and sell them on in aggregate.

This is a wild story about creating a business that buys and sells not using electricity. I jokingly suggested you could build an 'energy consumption facility' which was just a big resistor connected to ground (which is all an unprofitable bitcoin mining rig is) and then get paid for not using it.

The original source for this was Matt Levine over at Bloomberg. His take is also quite good: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-04-30/sel...