All of these announcements rely on suppliers purchasing "renewable energy certificates", which are like carbon offset certificates (as I understand it).
I am quite dubious of this as on paper the UK is far from producing enough renewable electricity.
At the moment the 'renewable mix' includes biomass, which is similar.
Interestingly, I recently saw a British supplier advertising not only renewable but vegan electricity... Because standard renewable includes animal waste biomass. Is this going too far?
True - but the management, production and transport of the wood pellets that go on to be burnt, produces more co2.
Plus burning stuff isn't that great a way to make power, especially wood - if you have ever tried to heat a house with wood verses a coal fire you'll understand.
Right now the wood pellets are just a way to skirt the rules - I doubt they'll be part of the mix for long, as solar/wind drops in price, along with cheap and reliable storage.
It's not cheating, it's conflating renewability with pollution generation.
Forestry is a well-understood topic that has made wood one of the most widely-used renewable resources in the world. Burning wood still produces large amounts of carbon dioxide/monoxide.
The wood has absorbed the equal amount of carbon from the air, which has reverted the previous burning. As long as we won't take down all the trees, it shouldn't be accounted as net negative.
Of course the other pollutants created from burning wood in population centers kill us when inhaled, so we've traded a minor source of CO2, which might kill us through some correlated highly delayed uncertain mechanism in an uncertain future, for something that is actively toxic and cancerous.
Burning wood for heating is the diesel car story all over again. The tradeoff makes zero sense.
Burning anything can be "actively" toxic and cancerous. You can argue about the process of anything, but that shifts the conversation away from the energy source.
Wood doesen't have to be burned in X place, and it _could_ be gathered and processed using clean procedures, but they're outside of the scope of wood being carbon neutral.
Plants capture CO2, but not CO. Wood burning produces both CO2 and CO (with the balance between the two depending on how well ventilated the burner is), so the whole process still ends up producing pollution.
Also, even if the process as a whole is a net neutral over time, the system requires some amount of CO2 buffering in the atmosphere. The more you use wood as a fuel, the more CO2 you'll have in the atmosphere as part of this buffering.
Or, put differently — "net neutral" just tells you that you can reach a steady state, but doesn't tell you how heavily polluted that steady state is. Higher numbers of wood burners in use still translates into a more heavily polluted steady state.
It doesn't seem that dubious - it simply means there are lots of big businesses (steel/aluminium/glass/concrete factories) which don't buy any of these renewable certificates.
It's a bit of a flaw with the whole system really - only companies with a public brand to protect will go renewable, which is far from the economically smart way to do it.
My point is that I am not sure that there is enough renewable electricity to meet the demand, and that certificates seem to be a bit massaging the numbers...
You don't believe there is enough renewablably-produced electricity to meet the demand for certificates? I suspect you might be over-estimating the demand for certificates!
Not demand for certificates but demand for electricity overall.
My understanding is that if you're producing through natural gas and someone else is producing through wind you can buy a certificate from them and then claim that your electricity is renewable.
The UK's energy mix is still 50+% gas, and I believe nuclear is not considered renewable... So there is a serious limit to what suppliers can claim is really coming from renewable sources. Especially at night.
I'm not a big fan of certificates but there is already enough renewable to power all eon customers.
gas is 40%, wind 16.9% solar 4% biomass 6.3% [1]
E-ON is about 13% [2] of the market share, just wind is enough to cover that and more (and 13% is assuming the grid generates energy just for customers, not industries, which it isn't)
Point is, there is enough renewable energy on the grid, it's a matter of how energy suppliers are going to fight to package it to clients. If the fight becomes hard on their end, they will be incentivised to generate more renewable.
What I want is the big picture, moving the needle towards more renewable. I don't want all of my electrons to come from a wind turbine, just voting with my wallet such that renewable percentage goes up and up.
With all the challenges it implies in terms of peak management, storage, seasons etc.
I'm not sure about this logic though. I've been thinking about it recently as I'm on a similar renewable-only tarrif with a different energy company and was thinking of switching to an eletric car.
If the price is the same as the non-renewable suppliers and not all electricity is from renewable sources, then by switching to a renewable supplier all you're doing is bumping someone else onto a non-renewable supplier aren't you?
Presumably if everyone switched to a theoretical renewable-only supplier with no offset certificates now, they would have to stop making the renewable energy promise?
I would strongly assume that them claiming 100% RES means they have bought so-called Guarantees of Origin (GoOs) [1].
You can only sell GoOs to the extent that you actually produce energy, so while the actual energy that eons customers receive could come from any given source, it is matched by production from RES (which in turn goes to customers who may or may not have an energy provider that provides renewable energy).
Businesses (in the EU and other countries) have to buy credits if they produce more carbon than allowed:
> Each operator has an allowance of credits, where each unit gives the owner the right to emit one metric tonne of carbon dioxide or other equivalent greenhouse gas. Operators that have not used up their quotas can sell their unused allowances as carbon credits, while businesses that are about to exceed their quotas can buy the extra allowances as credits, privately or on the open market.
Carbon credits/offset certificates really shouldn't be allowed to be included when talking about 100% renewable energy. In fact I don't think carbon credits should exists.
We had the issue with sulfur dioxide in the late 80', early 90', but there where no SO2 credits, no offsets, just hard caps until the issue was resolved.
In the US, the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments established an emissions trading system to reduce
emissions of SO2 from fossil-fuel burning power plants located in the continental 48 states of the
United States. (...) Caps on emissions were implemented by issuing tradable allowances that in total equalled the annual cap level. To comply, sources were required to surrender one allowance for each ton of emissions. (...)
Without commenting on the veracity of E.ON's particular claim, the UK does import renewable from overseas, so the UK could well consume more renewable than it produces.
It definitely does, because it produces loads of non-renewables and then exports them for a nice profit. But consuming more renewables than we produce doesn't make a big dent in overall supply needed. As I explain above E.ON's plan there is to rely on the stubborn British consumer to continue to pay more for worse from their competitors. Or not so much "plan" as just what they're resigned to having happen.
The UK needs about 30-40GW of electricity. The import cables can move _maybe_ 5GW flat out if we import in every direction, although of those 2GW is ultimately from France which is nukes, so that's not renewable (it's green, but it isn't renewable) and another 1GW is Ireland, which is as likely to be burning peat (!) as running a wind farm.
About 20GW peak comes from CCGT, ie huge plants that burn natural gas and then use that to spin turbines while also capturing the excess heat to "close" the cycle and improve efficiency. Deeply non-renewable.
On a windy, bright summer's day that's still cool enough for people not to run all their air conditioning and fans, you might get the CCGT down to 5GW with the interconnects importing from most directions and some wood burners (which are technically renewable even though they aren't green at all) helping the wind + solar + nukes.
More likely, right now for example as I write this, the CCGT runs full blast, 20GW of fossil fuel electricity. It's very clean by 1980s standards, only producing water vapour and er... carbon dioxide. Shame the carbon dioxide might destroy our civilisation.
You're right to be dubious - but if these credits become sought after, expensive and rare because people are buying them up, the direction of travel is certainly beneficial. Hopefully EON will attempt to reduce its costs by investing in new renewable energy sources.
One problem is that when the credits can only be used for virtue signalling, the same energy generation gets counted twice. For example, Norway produces virtually all of its power from renewable sources, and then sells the credits to Germany. The Norwegian consumers know that they are using renewable power, because they can see the hydro dams, and the Germans know that they are using renewable power, because they bought the carbon credits. Even though they can see coal or gas plants that are "obviously" actually powering their grid.
This doesn't work as well if you actually have cap-and-trade for carbon emissions, and fine countries that don't have the right amount of credits. In that case a country that sells all its credits ends up getting fined.
I'm (UK) with Octopus Energy on their super green tariff. They state that the electricity is from 100% renewable sources. No mention of renewable energy certificates; it's possible I haven't read the fine print closely enough but it does seem to be the real deal.
The Super Green tariff uses power purchased directly from renewable generators (PPAs), not certificates (REGOs). It also carbon offsets your gas usage.
Our other no-quite-so-super-green tariffs also provide 100% green electricity but do so using a mix of PPAs and REGOs.
I am wondering if this is a way to offset the intermittence problem... Are you allowed to buy a solar power certificate to offset an energy consumption during the night? If yes, then it is meaningless indeed. However if this amounts to making sure that some renewable energy is produced every second some energy is consumed on Eon's network, then that's a very good policy.
E.ON is one of the UK’s largest renewable energy generators and plans to draw from its own windfarms, biomass plants and solar projects to power the switch.
It will also need to top up its portfolio by buying renewable “guarantee certificates”, which are sold by renewable energy developers to guarantee that a set amount of electricity has been generated from a specific project.
So they are using certificates a bit.
There are firms such as Ecotricity that supply purely renewable energy without buying certificates.
Just a quick warning - I've saved hundreds switching away from Ecotricity. Personally I'd rather give the money saved to a tree planting charity myself, should I wish to do so.
As an Ecotricity customer I do wonder about this. My bills seem to go up every 6 months and are already pretty high.
Then again, I used to be with Eon and their customer service is outrageously abysmal - dropped calls, 30+ minute hold times etc. With Ecotricity I get straight through to a local human every time.
Not from the UK but how often does that happen that you have to call your utility company? I cannot say I ever had to do that and i'm mid 40s and home owner since 22.
These guys aren't exactly the utility company. So in one sense that's good, they aren't the ones taking the call when a tree falls on a power line, or some idiot hits a cable while digging a trench, or your whole street blacks out for no apparent reason. That's a problem for a Network Operator, a natural monopoly which will have emergency contact numbers and in my experience those are fairly good at answering, although obviously only calls about actual problems with their supply network.
The "supplier" for a consumer is actually basically just a bunch of legal contracts, a spreadsheet, a marketing budget and a call centre. And you do end up calling them when things go wrong with that part, which is too often. I usually end up talking to them at least once near the start of a relationship because they got something important wrong, and when I move home or any circumstances change.
It _should_ all be seamless but it often isn't. And ordinary consumers don't understand that it's just spreadsheets, they are genuinely distressed that a screw-up might mean their lights stop working, their food is ruined in the fridge etcetera. So this creates a reluctance to even risk using a different "supplier".
Right now it's super smooth for me, I went to full "smart meter" billing, there's a wireless box somewhere telling what it'll cost when I remember to look and the money vanishes from my current account on cue, no action needed for years at a time (need to review the tarif design, ie mix of fixed and variable charges online every few years or you get a shit default deal). But a decade ago I spent months contesting charges with one of these suppliers because they had a meter reference down wrong in some database and couldn't get the fix to "stick" so I'd get next door's usage billed, I'd complain, they'd "fix" it, same next month, repeat.
Eon is an awful company to deal with. I still have an outstanding issue from 2013 that they refuse to resolve. I get an automated call EVERY DAY demanding payment even though I have proven to them again and again that they in fact owe me money. You are not given an option to speak to a human. These types of calls should not be allowed. Endless waiting times if you try to contact them only to speak to someone who (a) has to have everything explained to them again (b) is not empowered to resolve the issue. Very frustrating. Renewable energy or not, avoid Eon.
I'm going with these guys - nothing to disclose and can't comment on them yet as the switch hasn't happened - but according to the comparison site I used I'm going to be saving £400 a year or so :-o
Mostly they rely on the fact that extraordinarily most Britons still buy their energy from a local "incumbent" electricity supplier even though that costs more.
Years ago residential customers in the UK were obligatory customers of monopoly government owned suppliers in each region. You could only buy (residential or small business) electricity from the same people who ran all the cables where you lived, thus a natural monopoly, which was government owned.
Then there was an era of government very enthusiastic about the Free Market even where it has no obvious place (again: natural monopoly) and even more enthusiastic about moving debts and long term costs off government books created a new system. The actual power grid - the natural monopoly - is now run by a single for-profit company but the consumer buys electricity from any of dozens of pointless entities that exist only to buy and sell notional electricity and bill customers on top of that supply network, many created from the carcasses of the old monopoly regional suppliers.
To bootstrap this situation consumers needed to start out with a supplier, and so they were all assigned the one that had previously been their monopoly supplier anyway, the "incumbent".
What was expected to happen was they'd all offer lower prices to new customers (this happened) and everybody would switch and create a new equilibrium in which almost everybody got lower prices and was more willing to change supplier. Your actual electricity supply would always come from the boring reliable (but now privately owned) grid, but you'd pay whichever imaginary "supplier" charged a few quid less, or had a cool mascot in their TV ads or whatever.
But almost everyone ignored it. Given the choice between paying an incumbent supplier £100 or finding out how to change supplier to get a cheaper £80 deal, almost all consumers just kept paying £100. If you can't leave (e.g. often short lease tenants even if the law says they can change supplier find that in practice they really can't) you're stuck paying £100 while a pro-Free Market politician struts about on TV saying how they've saved you £20.
But the biggest impact is that because the incumbents control so much of the market and consumers don't care, you can offer almost anything, even seemingly unrealistic things like "100% Renewable electricity for all customers" and know you'll only get a handful of takers anyway.
My mother switched to a tiny local "supplier", which promptly went bankrupt. Despite the fact that her power worked throughout (like I said these suppliers don't actually supply anyway) and she wasn't billed for that power (the bankruptcy appears to have made it difficult to even figure out what customers owe them) she found this traumatic enough that she now refuses to ever switch away from her incumbent again.
In Ireland we did the same thing with similar effects, but it's far from "almost everyone ignored it". The old incumbents have 47% and 49% [0] share in the gas and electricity markets respectively, after approximately 20 years.
That said, 50% is still a lot of stickiness and consumers do act as if there are large switching costs. The companies act this way, too: they all offer roughly the same price (and same product, of course) in the long term, but give discounts to customers that switch every 1-2 years.
Western Power Distribution have an app called "carbon tracer" so you can see how much of your energy (if you live in their region, the South West of England) comes from renewables, fossil fuels, nuclear, or other. They also break out each of those into sub categories. They provide a forecast so consumers can schedule high energy use during times when there's more renewable production.
Very cool. Worth emphasising that there is a distinction between the power you buy from an energy supplier and the energy mix that is actually flowing in the local distribution network.
Suppliers are responsible for delivering the right amount of energy to the transmission network for each half hourly period which needs to match the amount their customers are consuming. (This is estimated based on applying a set of models to customer meter data so there are multiple settlement "runs" carried out, some months after the HH period in question). Balancing within the half-hour is a service provided by the system operator which is currently a part of National Grid and for which a small charge is levied.
Injecting too much power into the grid when the grid is net over-supplied or too little when the grid is net under-supplied leads to the supplier owing balancing charges.
Stabilising the grid to prevent those under-deliveries or over-deliveries destabilising the grid is also the responsibility of the system operator.
So if your supplier buys 100% renewable power but you live somewhere far away from renewable generation your power both is and is not 100% renewable. In a certain sense it is because the whole grid is connected and higher a % of renewable power is demanded, the higher a % has to be generated in the system. In another sense it isn't because some of the energy you consume is being supplied by non-renewable sources. Of course in the latter view you also have to account that other people who have not explicitly paid for renewable energy are receiving it because you have.
You might enjoy articles like "The EPA Declared That Burning Wood Is Carbon Neutral. It’s Actually a Lot More Complicated" [1] and "Congress Says Biomass Is Carbon-Neutral, but Scientists Disagree" [2]
TLDR: If you chop down an acre of forest, burn the wood and replant, it takes 40-100 years to capture the amount of carbon released. And that's assuming the company doesn't harvest the forest again during that period - which they likely will, as doing so is a key part of their business.
Renewable, clean, carbon-neutral... these are just PR buzzwords.
To actually improve the world, we need to consider actual effects of different energy production methods on the environment (and society). Personally, I prefer nuclear, even though it's definitely not renewable, and possibly not even "clean". Also, I consider it very likely that oil will remain a better portable power source than batteries for some applications - it can never be clean, but it can be renewable and carbon-neutral (just like burning wood/making paper). Wind, hydro, solar - obviously these are all quite good (though they still have some impact on the environment), but unfortunately not every part of the world can utilise all, or any, of them.
========================================
Edit to answer u/Angostura - HN is rate-limiting my replies:
Sure, but nuclear isn't renewable (but still good), and carbon-neutral is more a description of production method than of the goodness or badness of an energy source.
Oil is just a chemical. Just as you can burn it (reduce it to CO2 and water), you can synthesise it. Just because we don't know how or can't do it efficiently, doesn't mean we won't figure it out in the next few decades.
So we could for example pave the Sahara with solar panels, use the energy to produce oil carbon-neutrally, export it through the world... Many different options, really depends on which direction the technology and politics will take!
> Renewable, clean, carbon-neutral... these are just PR buzzwords.
Renewable and carbon neutral really aren't. They have quite precise meaning.
I'm not sure how you can say that oil (assuming you don't mean vegetable oil) can be renewable or carbon neutral - at least not over period shorter than geological epochs
The UK does have nuclear power. As far as I recall it's about 20%, gas is around 40% and the rest is hydro and wind. But before anyone argues about whether to increase nuclear or not, realise that the UK is one of the best places in the world for offshore and onshore wind energy potential. There's therefore an argument against increasing nuclear production, ignoring all of the other issues for and against, simply because there is so much free wind currently unexploited. Possibly some extra nuclear power will still be needed to cover the base load on the rarest of unwindy days, but even that argument must take into account the potential for interconnections to Scandinavia and mainland Europe. The nuclear vs wind debate is probably different in other countries with less wind.
In the UK we're always about 15% nuclear power[1]. Removing the huge proportion of gas should be next on the list, ideally with more zero carbon and nuclear power.
All residential customers have been switched, so yes (almost(1)) - EON are providing 100% renewable electricity.
(1)Or rather, mostly renewablably-produced electricity, and have agreed bought the renewable rights to some other suppliers' electricity i.e. the other suppliers can't sell the electricity to anyone else and call it renewable.
That's what I mean - it isn't 100% renewable and relies on small-print and creative accounting. So hard to know what to believe when it comes to renewable claims.
In the UK we have the national grid that supplies all connected homes in the UK. It is the sole supplier of electricity.
All electricity generated is fed to this national grid. Coal/Gas/Wind/Hydroelectric it doesn't matter. There are no separate streams from one generator of electricity that you can request from.
What you DO get is a choice of who bills you.
I'm unsure how these renewable energy certificates work. But it's likely a scam on the generation end that the suppliers will wave at naïve customers to hide the fact that there is zero difference between the electricity you by from eon or British gas, or any of the other billing agents.
In many European countries trees from the USA and Canada are imported to be burned for green, renewable energy. Technically it's true, but it's at great cost. Not even taking into account the costs of transportation.
Here's a Dutch documentary on the subject, though some US environmental activists & loggers are interviewed as well at around the 13 minute mark, so that part should be understandable for non-Dutch speaking people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LHGbiyvZto
Yup. In the UK this is mostly the activity of Drax, a really big (like by world standards) thermal power plant, converted from coal.
What used to happen was whole trains filled with coal would vanish into Drax's maw and several gigawatts (like I said, it's big) of electricity comes out, plus ludicrous amounts of toxic ash, clouds of smoke etcetera. Part of that plant is now idled, because we don't burn very much coal any more, but a big part was converted to consume trees instead. Notionally it's "waste" wood, but the tremendous volumes involved make that a joke. Like, oh, here's a "waste" forest I didn't need.
At first the UK government was like "Check out how green this is" and as the scientific consensus got further towards "Do not burn trees you idiots!" they've been gradually walking that back towards "Well, at least it isn't coal?". But it operates 24/7 because Drax gets those renewable credits and is relatively cheap to operate, plus it's employment.
> All electricity generated is fed to this national grid. Coal/Gas/Wind/Hydroelectric it doesn't matter. There are no separate streams from one generator of electricity that you can request from.
I see this comment a lot. But doesn’t everybody know this and who cares? All I care of is where my money goes, not the specific electricity I get. (It might be a scam in other ways though)
So what do you call it if an energy retailer sells X joules of electricity to consumers and buys X joules from renewable energy suppliers? Yes the market is pooled, but if all retailers did this, there would be only renewables being fed in to the pool. That's the point, no?
Well, you don't know how it works but you're sure it's a scam and ridiculous?
I would suggest informing yourself about the basics of energy markets first before making such definitive statements.
Obviously the electrons you get might come from anywhere, but EON is buying energy to feed into the system to match the demand of it's customers. If they buy enough renewable to cover their demand than it's fair to say that they switched their consumers to renewables, even if the specific energy might end up elsewhere.
Here is a good way to think about it: What would it take for every energy supplier to offer 100% renewables? If that is only possible by running the system completely renewable, then the certificates are not lying.
Of course there is a displacement effect: If EON runs 100% renewable, and in return a larger supplier runs 10% renewable instead of 30% and doesn't tell their consumers, nothing is won. But if consumers start demanding or favouring renewables, then this latter supplier will also have an incentive to increase renewables in their system.
An electricity supplier really isn't a supplier, just a middle-man.
Electricity is produced by power stations, which is fed into the grid where customers consume it. The supplier isn't part of that process.
The producer sells the electricity at wholesale rates, which is purchased by the "supplier" company. The supplier company goes on to sell that electricity to their domestic/commercial customers at flattened rates.
Essentially, the supplier acts as an insurer against spikes in the wholesale price of electricity. Personally I'd love to be able to buy electricity without the middle-men because I would have the option to avoid peak times.
I think of it as similar to buying a "name a star" package. Sure you have faintly increased the commercial incentive to make more stars, and you have claimed that star as yours, but in another way the universe doesn't notice and there are still the same amount of stars regardless. Then people buying eco tariffs shout at me.
So much waste. We’ve built a mountain of bullshit while the world burns.
California and Germany spent 680 BILLION dollars on renewables. If they’d spent that much on nuclear power instead, they’d have unlimited carbon-free green energy TODAY.
ALERT, are you looking for billion dollar market disrupting startup opportunities? Well here you are, the UK electricity retailing market, all you have to to is take a reading from a UK electricity meter, work out a bill and take payment from the customer!! If you can do this without taking the wrong reading, without your online portal crashing and failing and generally avoiding muddling all the details so much that you can never untangle the mess no matter how much the customer begs, then you Sir will be a winner head and shoulders above all the existing companies!!! Go on, you can't really do worse than those who have gone before you.
My girlfriend works for an energy middleman company like this. It's actually way more complicated than you'd expect because everything is based on an 80s (cough Thatcher cough) text-based data interchange format (she calls them "flows", not sure of the actual name). Also there are a hell of a lot of weird and legacy stuff around electricity meters. Did you know some properties share meters for example?
Also since these companies are fungible middlemen, margins are very narrow.
The _actual_ business is a bit trickier than this would suggest, which is why loads of outfits go bankrupt.
The tricky part is that you need to buy long term energy supply contracts. Nobody will sell you 40MW of electricity right now, they want to sell you 40MWyears of power in 2020. But you only get paid by consumers for instantaneous power used, and only after they've used the power (very poor customers pay up front but they make negligible difference to your profitability although it wastes a lot of their money).
If I buy £4 billion of energy, and bring in £5 billion over ten years selling it to consumers, then I'm up £1 billion but I needed to borrow that money for ten years! Worse, if I buy £4 billion of energy, but meanwhile markets change and I can only sell it for £3 billion over ten years I'm going to _lose_ a billion pounds and my investors can see what's happening long in advance. Ouch.
You need a LOT of capital to get into this business safely. If you don't have that capital you will go bankrupt the first time consumer prices fall and you can't absorb the difference. This is happening in the industry right now in the UK.
E.On owns a lot of generators, which is both a capital intensive business (they own these very expensive wind turbines and stuff) and also a potential hedge against the consumer side losing too much money. If consumer prices fall, E.On's consumer side can share the pain with its generator business.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadI am quite dubious of this as on paper the UK is far from producing enough renewable electricity.
Renewable energy can be bad for the environment too, it's not magic. If we found a way to make renewable oil, it wouldn't be environment friendly.
At the moment the 'renewable mix' includes biomass, which is similar.
Interestingly, I recently saw a British supplier advertising not only renewable but vegan electricity... Because standard renewable includes animal waste biomass. Is this going too far?
Since energy generation is a 'free market' in the UK - why shouldn't there be more niche suppliers?
That's why it is usually considered carbon neutral.
Plus burning stuff isn't that great a way to make power, especially wood - if you have ever tried to heat a house with wood verses a coal fire you'll understand.
Right now the wood pellets are just a way to skirt the rules - I doubt they'll be part of the mix for long, as solar/wind drops in price, along with cheap and reliable storage.
Forestry is a well-understood topic that has made wood one of the most widely-used renewable resources in the world. Burning wood still produces large amounts of carbon dioxide/monoxide.
Burning wood for heating is the diesel car story all over again. The tradeoff makes zero sense.
Wood doesen't have to be burned in X place, and it _could_ be gathered and processed using clean procedures, but they're outside of the scope of wood being carbon neutral.
In that case, unless the entire chain uses renewable energy, it can't be considered carbon neutral.
If you burn existing forest and do not replant it it does produce extra CO2.
Also, even if the process as a whole is a net neutral over time, the system requires some amount of CO2 buffering in the atmosphere. The more you use wood as a fuel, the more CO2 you'll have in the atmosphere as part of this buffering.
Or, put differently — "net neutral" just tells you that you can reach a steady state, but doesn't tell you how heavily polluted that steady state is. Higher numbers of wood burners in use still translates into a more heavily polluted steady state.
It's a bit of a flaw with the whole system really - only companies with a public brand to protect will go renewable, which is far from the economically smart way to do it.
My understanding is that if you're producing through natural gas and someone else is producing through wind you can buy a certificate from them and then claim that your electricity is renewable.
The UK's energy mix is still 50+% gas, and I believe nuclear is not considered renewable... So there is a serious limit to what suppliers can claim is really coming from renewable sources. Especially at night.
gas is 40%, wind 16.9% solar 4% biomass 6.3% [1]
E-ON is about 13% [2] of the market share, just wind is enough to cover that and more (and 13% is assuming the grid generates energy just for customers, not industries, which it isn't)
Point is, there is enough renewable energy on the grid, it's a matter of how energy suppliers are going to fight to package it to clients. If the fight becomes hard on their end, they will be incentivised to generate more renewable.
[1] http://www.mygridgb.co.uk/last-12-months/
[2] https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data-portal/electricity-supply-mark...
Eon are not the only ones coming up with such tariffs, most suppliers are jumping on the bandwagon.
What I want is the big picture, moving the needle towards more renewable. I don't want all of my electrons to come from a wind turbine, just voting with my wallet such that renewable percentage goes up and up.
With all the challenges it implies in terms of peak management, storage, seasons etc.
Advertising "100% renewable energy" means that there is enough renewable energy produced to meet demand at all times.
That's part of why I am dubious of these claims. It does not seem straightforward to guarantee this to millions of customers.
If the price is the same as the non-renewable suppliers and not all electricity is from renewable sources, then by switching to a renewable supplier all you're doing is bumping someone else onto a non-renewable supplier aren't you?
Presumably if everyone switched to a theoretical renewable-only supplier with no offset certificates now, they would have to stop making the renewable energy promise?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_of_origin#Production...
> Each operator has an allowance of credits, where each unit gives the owner the right to emit one metric tonne of carbon dioxide or other equivalent greenhouse gas. Operators that have not used up their quotas can sell their unused allowances as carbon credits, while businesses that are about to exceed their quotas can buy the extra allowances as credits, privately or on the open market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit
We had the issue with sulfur dioxide in the late 80', early 90', but there where no SO2 credits, no offsets, just hard caps until the issue was resolved.
In the US, the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments established an emissions trading system to reduce emissions of SO2 from fossil-fuel burning power plants located in the continental 48 states of the United States. (...) Caps on emissions were implemented by issuing tradable allowances that in total equalled the annual cap level. To comply, sources were required to surrender one allowance for each ton of emissions. (...)
https://www2.dmu.dk/atmosphericenvironment/expost/database/d...
The UK needs about 30-40GW of electricity. The import cables can move _maybe_ 5GW flat out if we import in every direction, although of those 2GW is ultimately from France which is nukes, so that's not renewable (it's green, but it isn't renewable) and another 1GW is Ireland, which is as likely to be burning peat (!) as running a wind farm.
About 20GW peak comes from CCGT, ie huge plants that burn natural gas and then use that to spin turbines while also capturing the excess heat to "close" the cycle and improve efficiency. Deeply non-renewable.
On a windy, bright summer's day that's still cool enough for people not to run all their air conditioning and fans, you might get the CCGT down to 5GW with the interconnects importing from most directions and some wood burners (which are technically renewable even though they aren't green at all) helping the wind + solar + nukes.
More likely, right now for example as I write this, the CCGT runs full blast, 20GW of fossil fuel electricity. It's very clean by 1980s standards, only producing water vapour and er... carbon dioxide. Shame the carbon dioxide might destroy our civilisation.
> "Clean power is available on all its tariffs at no extra cost with most of the renewable energy coming from its own wind, biomass and solar sources"
So they're already heavily invested(ing?)
This doesn't work as well if you actually have cap-and-trade for carbon emissions, and fine countries that don't have the right amount of credits. In that case a country that sells all its credits ends up getting fined.
Our other no-quite-so-super-green tariffs also provide 100% green electricity but do so using a mix of PPAs and REGOs.
There's more info here: https://octopus.energy/blog/generators/
(I work for Octopus Energy)
E.ON is one of the UK’s largest renewable energy generators and plans to draw from its own windfarms, biomass plants and solar projects to power the switch.
It will also need to top up its portfolio by buying renewable “guarantee certificates”, which are sold by renewable energy developers to guarantee that a set amount of electricity has been generated from a specific project.
So they are using certificates a bit.
There are firms such as Ecotricity that supply purely renewable energy without buying certificates.
Then again, I used to be with Eon and their customer service is outrageously abysmal - dropped calls, 30+ minute hold times etc. With Ecotricity I get straight through to a local human every time.
The "supplier" for a consumer is actually basically just a bunch of legal contracts, a spreadsheet, a marketing budget and a call centre. And you do end up calling them when things go wrong with that part, which is too often. I usually end up talking to them at least once near the start of a relationship because they got something important wrong, and when I move home or any circumstances change.
It _should_ all be seamless but it often isn't. And ordinary consumers don't understand that it's just spreadsheets, they are genuinely distressed that a screw-up might mean their lights stop working, their food is ruined in the fridge etcetera. So this creates a reluctance to even risk using a different "supplier".
Right now it's super smooth for me, I went to full "smart meter" billing, there's a wireless box somewhere telling what it'll cost when I remember to look and the money vanishes from my current account on cue, no action needed for years at a time (need to review the tarif design, ie mix of fixed and variable charges online every few years or you get a shit default deal). But a decade ago I spent months contesting charges with one of these suppliers because they had a meter reference down wrong in some database and couldn't get the fix to "stick" so I'd get next door's usage billed, I'd complain, they'd "fix" it, same next month, repeat.
http://www.breezeenergy.co.uk/
Years ago residential customers in the UK were obligatory customers of monopoly government owned suppliers in each region. You could only buy (residential or small business) electricity from the same people who ran all the cables where you lived, thus a natural monopoly, which was government owned.
Then there was an era of government very enthusiastic about the Free Market even where it has no obvious place (again: natural monopoly) and even more enthusiastic about moving debts and long term costs off government books created a new system. The actual power grid - the natural monopoly - is now run by a single for-profit company but the consumer buys electricity from any of dozens of pointless entities that exist only to buy and sell notional electricity and bill customers on top of that supply network, many created from the carcasses of the old monopoly regional suppliers.
To bootstrap this situation consumers needed to start out with a supplier, and so they were all assigned the one that had previously been their monopoly supplier anyway, the "incumbent".
What was expected to happen was they'd all offer lower prices to new customers (this happened) and everybody would switch and create a new equilibrium in which almost everybody got lower prices and was more willing to change supplier. Your actual electricity supply would always come from the boring reliable (but now privately owned) grid, but you'd pay whichever imaginary "supplier" charged a few quid less, or had a cool mascot in their TV ads or whatever.
But almost everyone ignored it. Given the choice between paying an incumbent supplier £100 or finding out how to change supplier to get a cheaper £80 deal, almost all consumers just kept paying £100. If you can't leave (e.g. often short lease tenants even if the law says they can change supplier find that in practice they really can't) you're stuck paying £100 while a pro-Free Market politician struts about on TV saying how they've saved you £20.
But the biggest impact is that because the incumbents control so much of the market and consumers don't care, you can offer almost anything, even seemingly unrealistic things like "100% Renewable electricity for all customers" and know you'll only get a handful of takers anyway.
My mother switched to a tiny local "supplier", which promptly went bankrupt. Despite the fact that her power worked throughout (like I said these suppliers don't actually supply anyway) and she wasn't billed for that power (the bankruptcy appears to have made it difficult to even figure out what customers owe them) she found this traumatic enough that she now refuses to ever switch away from her incumbent again.
That said, 50% is still a lot of stickiness and consumers do act as if there are large switching costs. The companies act this way, too: they all offer roughly the same price (and same product, of course) in the long term, but give discounts to customers that switch every 1-2 years.
[0] (2018) https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2018/0706/976747-commission...
https://carbontracer.westernpower.co.uk/
Suppliers are responsible for delivering the right amount of energy to the transmission network for each half hourly period which needs to match the amount their customers are consuming. (This is estimated based on applying a set of models to customer meter data so there are multiple settlement "runs" carried out, some months after the HH period in question). Balancing within the half-hour is a service provided by the system operator which is currently a part of National Grid and for which a small charge is levied.
Injecting too much power into the grid when the grid is net over-supplied or too little when the grid is net under-supplied leads to the supplier owing balancing charges.
Stabilising the grid to prevent those under-deliveries or over-deliveries destabilising the grid is also the responsibility of the system operator.
So if your supplier buys 100% renewable power but you live somewhere far away from renewable generation your power both is and is not 100% renewable. In a certain sense it is because the whole grid is connected and higher a % of renewable power is demanded, the higher a % has to be generated in the system. In another sense it isn't because some of the energy you consume is being supplied by non-renewable sources. Of course in the latter view you also have to account that other people who have not explicitly paid for renewable energy are receiving it because you have.
They need to make the RoG more expensive to genuinely fuel renewables
Yes, when you want someone to buy more of something, you drastically hike the price, as economic law dictates...
I wonder if they filter their exhausts or just release the particles into the air.
TLDR: If you chop down an acre of forest, burn the wood and replant, it takes 40-100 years to capture the amount of carbon released. And that's assuming the company doesn't harvest the forest again during that period - which they likely will, as doing so is a key part of their business.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burni... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/congress-says-bio...
To actually improve the world, we need to consider actual effects of different energy production methods on the environment (and society). Personally, I prefer nuclear, even though it's definitely not renewable, and possibly not even "clean". Also, I consider it very likely that oil will remain a better portable power source than batteries for some applications - it can never be clean, but it can be renewable and carbon-neutral (just like burning wood/making paper). Wind, hydro, solar - obviously these are all quite good (though they still have some impact on the environment), but unfortunately not every part of the world can utilise all, or any, of them.
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Edit to answer u/Angostura - HN is rate-limiting my replies:
Sure, but nuclear isn't renewable (but still good), and carbon-neutral is more a description of production method than of the goodness or badness of an energy source.
Oil is just a chemical. Just as you can burn it (reduce it to CO2 and water), you can synthesise it. Just because we don't know how or can't do it efficiently, doesn't mean we won't figure it out in the next few decades.
So we could for example pave the Sahara with solar panels, use the energy to produce oil carbon-neutrally, export it through the world... Many different options, really depends on which direction the technology and politics will take!
Renewable and carbon neutral really aren't. They have quite precise meaning.
I'm not sure how you can say that oil (assuming you don't mean vegetable oil) can be renewable or carbon neutral - at least not over period shorter than geological epochs
[1]http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php
Current budgeted future spending is £129B+ for cleanup, and £20B+ for Hinkley C. That will grow if more new sites are built.
You'd think, anyway.
(1)Or rather, mostly renewablably-produced electricity, and have agreed bought the renewable rights to some other suppliers' electricity i.e. the other suppliers can't sell the electricity to anyone else and call it renewable.
In the UK we have the national grid that supplies all connected homes in the UK. It is the sole supplier of electricity.
All electricity generated is fed to this national grid. Coal/Gas/Wind/Hydroelectric it doesn't matter. There are no separate streams from one generator of electricity that you can request from.
What you DO get is a choice of who bills you.
I'm unsure how these renewable energy certificates work. But it's likely a scam on the generation end that the suppliers will wave at naïve customers to hide the fact that there is zero difference between the electricity you by from eon or British gas, or any of the other billing agents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)
(Edit: added Wikipedia URL)
https://www.businessinsider.com/europe-imports-wood-biomass-...
Here's a Dutch documentary on the subject, though some US environmental activists & loggers are interviewed as well at around the 13 minute mark, so that part should be understandable for non-Dutch speaking people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LHGbiyvZto
What used to happen was whole trains filled with coal would vanish into Drax's maw and several gigawatts (like I said, it's big) of electricity comes out, plus ludicrous amounts of toxic ash, clouds of smoke etcetera. Part of that plant is now idled, because we don't burn very much coal any more, but a big part was converted to consume trees instead. Notionally it's "waste" wood, but the tremendous volumes involved make that a joke. Like, oh, here's a "waste" forest I didn't need.
At first the UK government was like "Check out how green this is" and as the scientific consensus got further towards "Do not burn trees you idiots!" they've been gradually walking that back towards "Well, at least it isn't coal?". But it operates 24/7 because Drax gets those renewable credits and is relatively cheap to operate, plus it's employment.
I see this comment a lot. But doesn’t everybody know this and who cares? All I care of is where my money goes, not the specific electricity I get. (It might be a scam in other ways though)
I would suggest informing yourself about the basics of energy markets first before making such definitive statements.
Obviously the electrons you get might come from anywhere, but EON is buying energy to feed into the system to match the demand of it's customers. If they buy enough renewable to cover their demand than it's fair to say that they switched their consumers to renewables, even if the specific energy might end up elsewhere.
Here is a good way to think about it: What would it take for every energy supplier to offer 100% renewables? If that is only possible by running the system completely renewable, then the certificates are not lying.
Of course there is a displacement effect: If EON runs 100% renewable, and in return a larger supplier runs 10% renewable instead of 30% and doesn't tell their consumers, nothing is won. But if consumers start demanding or favouring renewables, then this latter supplier will also have an incentive to increase renewables in their system.
Electricity is produced by power stations, which is fed into the grid where customers consume it. The supplier isn't part of that process.
The producer sells the electricity at wholesale rates, which is purchased by the "supplier" company. The supplier company goes on to sell that electricity to their domestic/commercial customers at flattened rates.
Essentially, the supplier acts as an insurer against spikes in the wholesale price of electricity. Personally I'd love to be able to buy electricity without the middle-men because I would have the option to avoid peak times.
California and Germany spent 680 BILLION dollars on renewables. If they’d spent that much on nuclear power instead, they’d have unlimited carbon-free green energy TODAY.
Also since these companies are fungible middlemen, margins are very narrow.
The tricky part is that you need to buy long term energy supply contracts. Nobody will sell you 40MW of electricity right now, they want to sell you 40MWyears of power in 2020. But you only get paid by consumers for instantaneous power used, and only after they've used the power (very poor customers pay up front but they make negligible difference to your profitability although it wastes a lot of their money).
If I buy £4 billion of energy, and bring in £5 billion over ten years selling it to consumers, then I'm up £1 billion but I needed to borrow that money for ten years! Worse, if I buy £4 billion of energy, but meanwhile markets change and I can only sell it for £3 billion over ten years I'm going to _lose_ a billion pounds and my investors can see what's happening long in advance. Ouch.
You need a LOT of capital to get into this business safely. If you don't have that capital you will go bankrupt the first time consumer prices fall and you can't absorb the difference. This is happening in the industry right now in the UK.
E.On owns a lot of generators, which is both a capital intensive business (they own these very expensive wind turbines and stuff) and also a potential hedge against the consumer side losing too much money. If consumer prices fall, E.On's consumer side can share the pain with its generator business.