I am quite dubious of this as on paper the UK is far from producing enough renewable electricity.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> "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.
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.
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)
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...