The fossil plants are either needed for reliability purposes, i.e. spinning reserve, voltage support, or they are online because it is more economical for them to stay online. It is often better for the plants to stay online at minimum generation than shut down and endure a restart time of several hours.
This is the equivalent of saying the $999 you saved for your Macbook didn't actually buy you that Macbook, because once your money entered the bank, it became indistinguishable and inseparable from all the other money in the bank, and who knows which pennies went where.
Well, that's true, and if you insist that your $999 bought your Macbook, you can take precautions to ensure that (at enormous temporal sacrifice). As a practical matter, this doesn't matter to anybody, so we come together as a society and agree that transactions don't need a perfectly isolated series of exchanges, so long as the credits and debits match up.
Quite interesting remark.
However, I'm not saying the savings from producing more wind are not real. They are very real, because you avoided using other means of production, potentially fossil fuels. So that's good.
On the other hand, saying that you basically got your Macbook for free (saved all the money, i.e. ran exclusively on wind) can only work if you didn't spend anything else.
Saving 999$ but spending 200 more (i.e. also having coal) and not counting it because you somehow earned more money somewhere else (i.e. exported it) is not what I call proper bookkeeping.
and that's exactly the point: we should focus on whether or not you got any money from coal, regardless of what you did with it, because that's what is driving emissions in the end.
The point that all the energy mixes together is not the main point. The main point is that dialling up wind does not always help anyone dial down fossil fuels for many reasons, and what we should be striving for and measuring is the reduction in fossil fuel use not the increase in the use of any other generation technology.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] threadThis is the equivalent of saying the $999 you saved for your Macbook didn't actually buy you that Macbook, because once your money entered the bank, it became indistinguishable and inseparable from all the other money in the bank, and who knows which pennies went where.
Well, that's true, and if you insist that your $999 bought your Macbook, you can take precautions to ensure that (at enormous temporal sacrifice). As a practical matter, this doesn't matter to anybody, so we come together as a society and agree that transactions don't need a perfectly isolated series of exchanges, so long as the credits and debits match up.
The same is true for energy.
On the other hand, saying that you basically got your Macbook for free (saved all the money, i.e. ran exclusively on wind) can only work if you didn't spend anything else. Saving 999$ but spending 200 more (i.e. also having coal) and not counting it because you somehow earned more money somewhere else (i.e. exported it) is not what I call proper bookkeeping.