Eon Switches All U.K. Customers to Renewable Power

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.

From the Guardian:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But it does contribute explicit demand for it. And there's only so far you can ship it. It's not international like carbon offsets.

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.

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.

>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...

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.

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?

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.

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

> 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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!

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.

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.

We did, in 1956 and continue to invest.

Current budgeted future spending is £129B+ for cleanup, and £20B+ for Hinkley C. That will grow if more new sites are built.

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.

[1]http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

You may find this interesting: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk

They are building nuclear but it's slow and expensive.