News and great links are piling up, so this is a special extra edition of Friday Reads:
• Mayor announces plans to power TfL on renewables (AirQualityNews)
• France’s bonus malus vehicle tax scheme make buyers of high emitting vehicles pay (Hyperdrive)
• Mcr museum exhibition space & entrance created under vaulted railway viaduct (Dezeen)
• North America finally upgrading commuter rail to regional rail (Low&High)
• History of the Long Island Rail Road (UrbanOmnibus)
• LA’s tunnelled downtown LRT regional connector: a trend (RMTransit)
• Google, Apple Maps often leave off rapid transit lines (AlexandraRose)
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“Google, Apple Maps often leave off rapid transit lines” – I note my ongoing battle as a Level 8 Google Guide to get all of the TfL services shown on the Google Maps public transmit layer for London – they’re all there except Romford-Upminster and the Trams – has now been undermined by the addition of the Thameslink to the Tube Map!
I wonder how TfL will check that the electricity they receive actually comes from renewable sources, and no some nasty gas fired power station. Are the electrons coloured green?
The wind has hardly blown for the last fortnight. So it makes you wonder what all those people who have bought 100% renewable power are using when the sun isn’t high in the sky and shining bright. There isn’t enough to go around. That includes me – but I only bought it because it was cheap. Renewable power needs subsidy, so how can I buy 100% renewable power, and pay less than most other people? Is it perhaps a con?
They are allowed to say it is 100% renewable, even though they have not bought anywhere near enough renewable power for their customers for days on end. One way is they could buy more when it’s windy to make up for it, though without the inconvenience and enormous cost of having to store it. But in fact, they don’t even have to buy any renewable power at all. They can just buy REGO (renewable energy guarantee of origin) certificates. Those cost about 0.03p per kWh. Yes, that’s about 0.2% of the price of domestic electricity.
They can even buy foreign certificates – Italy and Norway are large exporters of certificates – though I don’t think we import very many, they are mainly exported to places like the Netherlands. So about 70% of Dutch households buy 100% renewable power, but less than 10% of Dutch electricity is renewable. And no one says that Norway produces less renewable power and the Netherlands more because the Netherlands buys lots of Norwegian certificates.
The price of a REGO certificate is so small, it makes little difference to the decision of a renewable energy supplier to generate or invest. So a customer buying energy advertised as 100% renewable barely makes any difference to the amount produced. It is literally a trade in virtue attribution.
There are some, who advertise themselves prominently as selling “proper” renewable power, who do actually buy renewable power to match what they sell, not just certificates. But even they aren’t matching it hour by hour, which would be the real test. What would they do at times like the last fortnight when the wind hardly blew?