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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

~100% renewable is a dangerous half-truth, just 9% of the energy Norwegian consumers use is in reality renewable.

It's true that Norway produces more renewable energy than it uses energy, but since it sells its green power to other countries who pays more for "green power", Norwegian customers actually buy most of the power they consume from non-renewable sources elsewhere.

However, since Norwegian consumers "know" how green Norwegian power production is they don't care/know about paying extra for the EU goo (Guarantee of origin).

It's a dumb situation where two groups of customers (the ones who pay extra for green Norwegian GoOs and the Norwegians who rationally presume that the power they buy is "local" Norwegian green power) both believe they're buying the same green energy.

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This is a political thing. Norway produces and consumes near 100% renewable energies. They only sell other people certificates so that they can feel better. Many trains in Germany run on "renewable" energy, and nearly every utility company offers cheap renewable tariffs. In reality it's just certificates they bought from Norway.

That doesn't change anything for Norway though, it only shows that the current European energy policy can easily be abused. The case remains that Norway can easily add more renewable production and use that to grow vegetables in containers (ideally adapted so that they can cope with fluctuating supply). Norway has so much potential that they can still export more energy towards Europe, but as Denmark has the same plans, running significantly more wires towards southern Germany is the main problem here, not some certificates.

Isn't this a virtual thing? I don't know anything about this but I'd say most energy in Norway's houses is indeed produced via renewables (I mean the actual energy, say, the electrons being transported) and then a virtual transaction is handled by interested parties (say other countries' governments). For example, Germany could pay Norway x for an exchange of a percentage of renewables and nuclear, for stats and regulatory purposes, but the actual energy being consumed by Germans would still be produced by nuclear. Is this correct in any way?

Knowing which specific plant powers your home has little meaning in a comoditized business.

The important notion here is that a subset of consumers support the economic cost of running renewable energy plants, while the other subset of consumers are led to believe they do because of geographic proximity, when in fact they don't.

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