Is any greater good achieved when one selects a green source? Does it in any way, especially one to one way, mean that more of the energy used by the system will be of that source? Or will the system use that energy in any case and now just attributes it to you instead of having it be unattributed?
Not in that moment, no. In the longer run, demand for green power incentivises energy suppliers to expand green power generation, but in the moment of consumption, it makes no difference if a kilowatt is consumed by someone with a green energy provider or if a kilowatt is consumed by someone with a standard energy supplier not restricted to a particular source. It’s simply one kilowatt of power taken out of the grid which is fed by all the power generation capacity that’s currently running.
In theory, they buy more green power if more people are signed up for that program. That’s why we’re paying a premium.
When power flows from the generator to your house, electrons get mixed together on the wires. You can’t specify which electrons you get, but you can make sure that your money goes to support clean, sustainable generators, which has the effect of making the whole system “greener”.
But do they in reality?
Or are “we” paying a premium to give ourselves a feel good sense of green cred for what is already being done whether or not we pay the premium?
Here is what seems to be the key quote from the Union of Concerned Scientists cite:
How do I verify that the renewable offering will lead to new projects? Versus just get them more money for what is already mandated?
That’s why I included the link to the article by Union of Concerned Scientist (which I assume, perhaps mistakenly, is a legit group). They seem to think the green power programs are doing some good.
See also, Washington state, which regulates the local power companies.
The Revised Code of Washington (RCW) requires that electric utilities in the state offer “a voluntary option to purchase qualified alternative energy resources” to their customers (RCW 19.29A.090(2)). In accordance with this requirement, the state’s three investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs) - Avista Corporation (Avista), Pacific Power & Light Company (Pacific Power), and Puget Sound Energy (PSE) - have created special programs that help their customers access such alternative energy resources.
These programs typically work by allowing customers - including homeowners, renters, and business owners - to purchase “blocks” of alternative energy for a small fee per clock. Each customer can choose to offset as much of their energy usage as they wish, up to and including 100 percent of their monthly usage.
The energy delivered through these programs is “green” power that comes from the following sources:
Wind Solar Geothermal Landfill gas Wave or tide action Gas produced during the treatment of wastewater Qualified hydropower Biomass energy, so long as it meets certain requirements Dairy methane
See the quote from your cite.
In my state at least, Illinois, there is a renewable energy mandate and the renewables joining the grid seem like they’ll happen to comply with that, not because more sign up for community solar options.
This is the thing - if we get into the whole supply chain of fabricating - then we have to compare the contrasting pieces of EV vs. ICE fabrication. Any internal combustion engine plus transmission, plus assorted peripheral doo-dads like fuel pump, radiator, oil pump, carburetors (usually fuel injectors nowadays) spark plugs and ingnition systems… PLUS the transmission with dozens of finely machined gears… all that casting and machining, especially machining, takes energy. All the extra metals alloyed into the assorted parts also need to be mined. (Is lithium mining that much more complex than chromium or molybdenum? Nickel mining can be very polluting, as Sudbury Ontario will attest.) And we haven’t even talked about the interesting ingredients in a catalytic converter.
We’ll assume the general chassis, body, seats, suspension, tires. steering mechanism, windows, etc. are not much different between vehicles.
So trying to ascribe a footprint to fabrication of one type of vehicle or another is a complex task and my gut feeling is they will not be that much different, except for very small cars with small motors.
To my mind, too, the biggest advantage of making all those batteries - the composite elements don’t go anywhere. When it’s time to recycle the batteries from an electric car, all the lithium, nickel, cobalt, whatever is still inside the battery and ready to be re-extracted. All the carbon from running a conventional combustion engine for a decade - is out there in the atmosphere. Carbon from running power plants can be collected at one stationary point and so is more of a target for in situ recycling when the tech warrants.
Well, Xcel’s Windsource® page starts off with “Feel good about going green”. From there, they do not make it easy to understand what is happening when paying extra for Windsource® power.
This is my understanding, and please correct me if I’m wrong. A windfarm generates some electricity. For each MWh of electricity they generate, they also create a Renewable Energy Credit (REC). When I join Windsource® I pre-pay a bit extra for a set number of KWh of renewably generated electricity that I use. That extra money I pay is used to buy RECs from the windfarm.
Even though the electricity that visits my house could be generated anywhere on the grid (maybe my neighbors solar!), I pay a bit extra, which is given to the windfarm to help support the energy company’s failing fracking business encourage the energy company’s investment in renewables.
If I were a business buying RECs from Xcel, then I could use those RECs to meet Colorado’s renewable energy standard for businesses, which I do not know anything about.
Joking aside, it doesn’t seem terrible from an economic standpoint. Rules are put in place that make renewable electricity more valuable than non-renewable electricity. This should encourage investment in renewables, because the end result is more valuable. If there is a demand for renewable electricity, then people will pay this extra. Based on the waitlist to get into some of the pay-extra-for-renewables programs that Xcel offers, there does seem to be a demand.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of green power generation: There’s the kind that is economical on the current market without any extra help, and there’s the kind that is too expensive for that. The kind that’s economical, power companies would be buying anyway, because it’s economical. If X number of people sign up for “green power”, and the demand of those X people can be met with those already-economical sources, then nothing happens: Someone at the power company just writes down in a ledger that the green power is going to those people, and the fossil-fuel power is going to everyone else.
But if the number of people paying extra for green power exceeds what can be met with the cheap green sources, then the power company starts looking for the next-cheapest green source. Which is a bit more expensive than the going rate, but they can afford it because of the premium the green customers are paying. In this case, those folks choosing to pay extra for green power are making a difference.
Where exactly reality falls on this curve, I don’t know. It probably varies from place to place. But perhaps ironically, in times and places where green power is most abundant, such consumers’ choices make less difference.
That is what I was hinting at, sorry for not being more clear. EVs also have energy costs to build, and a real comparison has to look at the whole process. Including lifetime. ICE engines may be complex, but do last a relatively long time. And are easy to recycle. Current battery technologies have short lives and are expensive and dangerous to recycle.
It’s not that Li is harder to mine, just that right now the world does not have the production capacity.
However other technologies may come along and develop as usable solutions, such as hydrogen. Then a whole new bunch of considerations need to be worked out!
Also note that the powerful electric motors in EVs need rare earths for the magnets, not clear that we have enough of these; “rare” is in the name for a reason, even though they are plentiful in the earths crust supply is poor.
In the medium term, the most dramatic way to make a big reduction in carbon dioxide produced by cars is to drive less 
It’s not an absolute requirement. The first Tesla Model S cars were fully induction motors–no rare earth magnets needed. Permanent magnet motors are a tad more efficient, and at the moment the economics are in their favor. But if there’s a shortage, we can always go back to induction motors. It’s not a dramatic difference in efficiency–on the order of a few percent.
Very well said overall. As to the snip above with which I agree completely …
The other key thing with green power tech is that we’re still inventing it and improving it. e.g. a 2021 windmill kicks ass over a 1990 windmill. Unlike e.g. coal fired plants that are well-understood slow-changing tech.
So the best way to make green supply cheaper is to jumpstart (sorry) the demand which moves us more quickly up the technological maturity learning curve. So in addition to what you suggest about green demand triggering replacing less-cheap green supply with more-cheap green supply, it also provides a built-in demand for improved green generation tech. The generator suppliers know the demand will be there for their improved products because they can see it already in existence.
In addition to the improved tech is the simple improvements to scale. A windmill factory that makes 10 per year will probably do it by hand and they’ll be stupid expensive because all the R&D, design and engineering have to be amortized over few units. If that same company knows they can sell 10,000 of the things, they can invest in factory automation and amortize the fixed costs over a much larger production base. The end result is the same windmill can be made for much less money and sold for much less money and therefore deliver electricity for less money per KWH. Solely as a result of known pre-bought demand.
This argument is a LOT of what the various “voluntary premium price for green power” efforts are about. This is exactly the “pump priming” of Econ 101. The difference is the public is being asked to do it individually and voluntarily because the idea of government managed economic policy at the bleeding edge periphery that made our country wealthy has somehow become anathema.
I bet this is it.
Perhaps as more folks get solar and have some electrons to spare we’ll see more adoption of these kinds of options.
Well there’s the third: a fraction of the power provided that needs to be renewable by state mandate, even if it is less profitable than other options.
The scenario in which the power companies work their way to less cheap renewable, or more often to it becoming cheaper by way of economies of scale, is by more demand of those paying extra for green power only occurs when that demand number is greater than the mandate target would be achieving without their labelled participation. Otherwise, it seems to me, the power companies are double dipping, with consumers paying extra for what the companies are going to do in any case.
Obviously I may be not quite understanding how the renewable energy mandate program and their credits work but this article seems to me to be saying that in my state at least, Illinois, state funding to aid in meeting mandates is the driver, not demand by way of community solar payment mechanisms, the latter of which more “created budgeting unknowns”.
Not to be misunderstood. I am not “anti-EV”, just making the points
a) comparisons with ICE vehicles is more complex than us looking at daily operational items (I think this agreed by all)
b) the current popular/common EV technologies have some real limitations in respect to the kind of use we make of ICE vehicles
c) EV vehicles and technologies are not “nice and clean”, they do have environmental impacts as well
d) when Super-Battery arrives or economical and effective hydrogen storage issues are solved, then we redo all the assumptions!
This is just one source, but it’s important to remember that the price of electricity from wind and solar is already cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels. Many of the incentives to build more renewable energy sources already naturally exist in the market. The stimulation necessary to get over the cost hump worked.
One thing I rarely see discussed is that cars have a huge environmental impact outside of their use of fossil fuels. Roads, suburbs, tire dust, collisions, and other things enabled by cars, and necessary for cars, have their own impact, which is not changed by the use of EVs. Lifetime energy use and pollution from EVs is less than ICE cars, which is great, but not as good as making societal changes to lower the necessity of car use.
Mass transit, preferably electricity based, is going to be even more efficient and less polluting than individually owned ICE cars. That of course leads to the discussion of how mass transit systems in the US often fail to serve their communities, and how suburban sprawl (of both residences and businesses) makes it an incredibly difficult problem to solve.
Everybody driving an EV still leaves the problem that everybody is driving.
This is somewhat deceptive. Say you want to generate power by solar. You need to buy the solar plant and a fossil fuel or similar generator, so that you can keep supplying the same power to the grid during nights / cloudy days.
So effectively , your investment is double for the same continuous power output.
Not if you’re using the solar or wind power to charge electric cars, you don’t. Cars are usually parked for several times longer than the time actually needed to charge the batteries. So you just turn off the charger when the renewable energy goes offline, and as long as the uptime is at least a reasonable fraction, your car is still charged when you need it.
These kind of hypothetical cases don’t work for electrical power. People want power : as much and when they want it.
We use a Tesla for our daily commute. If we switch to solar panels at home : we won’t charge cars during the day. Storage is not cost efficient.
Even if we were to charge with Solar and only drive at night, there will be weeks/days (rain , clouds, etc) where we will be dependent on fossil power. If we were living off grid, then this fossil power will come from traditional generators.
So if I needed 10kw of power - I would buy 10KW of solar and 10KW of fossil fuel generator. There is no practical way around them.
What we need to be doing is installing solar canopies above all the large parking lots around. The parking lots of many buildings are larger than the buildings and I expect many of them could produce enough power to recharge the cars underneath them on most days. That is, if they’re combined with battery storage to cover periods of cloudy days. Here’s an example of one installed at Mt Rushmore:
OK, that’s providing power to the building, but that’s because few cars are EVs right now.