
Eon Switches All U.K. Customers to Renewable Power - perfunctory
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-09/eon-switches-millions-of-u-k-customers-to-100-renewable-power
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mytailorisrich
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.

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frenchman99
It's better than nothing, but the real change comes from suppliers producing
renewable energy and most importantly carbon-free energy.

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.

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imeron
In my country they consider heating with wood "renewable energy". This is
essentially cheating on the subject.

~~~
pdpi
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.

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Nyandalized
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.

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stefan_
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.

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Nyandalized
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.

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DanBC
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.

[https://carbontracer.westernpower.co.uk/](https://carbontracer.westernpower.co.uk/)

~~~
Mvandenbergh
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.

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TeamMCS
Sadly it costs next to nothing to buy a ROG, it's basically a percentage point
on the annual bill.

They need to make the RoG more expensive to genuinely fuel renewables

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navigatesol
> _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...

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opless
This is quite literally ridiculous.

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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_\(Great_Britain\))

(Edit: added Wikipedia URL)

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verytrivial
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?

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opless
This makes /some/ sense ... but it still smells of doublethink.

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gandalfian
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.

~~~
tialaramex
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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billpg
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.

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ChrisRR
It's worth noting that renewable also includes burning biomass, so that
doesn't mean it's necessarily mean it's clean energy

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bufferoverflow
Burning biomass, assuming it's grown by them, is carbon neutral.

I wonder if they filter their exhausts or just release the particles into the
air.

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michaelt
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.

[1] [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-
burni...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burning-wood-
carbon-neutral-180968880/) [2]
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/congress-says-
bio...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/congress-says-biomass-is-
carbon-neutral-but-scientists-disagree/)

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gandalfian
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.

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sunkenvicar
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.

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nmeofthestate
So, if all EON customers switch to renewable electricity (at no extra cost)
EON will not provide any non-renewable electricity to their customers.

You'd think, anyway.

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NLips
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.

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nmeofthestate
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.

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Angostura
As renewable credits are bought up and become scarcer, they become more
expensive - bolstering demand for new, renewable power sources.

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Bantros
Switch to Nuclear then maybe progress will be made

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sleavey
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.

