Sorry about this morning’s OTR post, restoring my laptop’s hard drive after repair went long after I gave up and went to bed last night. I’ll post it Monday.
I’ve been pondering this renewable energy question off and on recently and figured I’d open it up to discussion to broaden my thinking.
The question is: if you pay a surcharge for renewable energy from your electricity provider, is it better to then be wasteful or at least a “big consumer” of that clean electricity in order to increase demand for clean electricity and thus spurring more investment in renewables, or should you try to be as energy-conscious as possible and not leave lights on, keep the thermostat down/up, etc.?
In this scenario, the electricity that comes in your house is technically a mix of renewable and dirty, but you pay a surcharge to have clean energy equal to your usage added to your provider’s feed. If every customer chose this option, all the electricity provided to your home would be from renewable sources.
My thinking is that, since demand increases investment/supply, it’s desirable to consume more electricity once you’re setup to pay the premium as described above. More investment in renewable energy is a good and a larger supply/higher percentage renewable in the renewable/dirty mix that my provider supplies is also a good. So except for wasting some money, it seems to me like wasting electricity is actually a good here.
If your supply is already 100% renewable (from a provider, not your own solar/wind/etc.), I’m undecided if it makes sense to be a “big consumer” or not. Again, increasing demand means more investment in supply in your locality and region, and provides the market/investors evidence that such demand might exist in other under-served areas. Since a major goal of us who pay the surcharge for renewable or are willing to pay higher rates or invest in infrastructure like solar is to make a better, carbon-free world, there, perversely, seems to be a clear incentive to be wasteful here too. But I’m not sure.
What think you?
Consider this a non-political open thread.
khead
I’m old enough to remember when folks actually thought that a grid of renewable energy was something we were all striving to do as a nation. Like going to the moon.
trollhattan
“Negawatts” is a concept coined by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which asserts efficiency gains should be the first task in reconfiguring our electrical infrastructure. IIUC Californians use about half the average electricity compared to the rest of the country, and during the day CALISO often shows more than half our supply sourced from renewable generation, mostly solar, wind being a good portion on, well, windy days. Nighttime of course is another story.
Our local electricity utility is big on wind and solar, big on increasing consumer efficiency. Their portfolio is a mix of natural gas, hydro, solar and wind. As they expand renewables, they need to size the facilities to match demand and not overbuild–increasing consumer efficiency means they can ultimately build less and save big on capital costs.
IDK whether that addresses your question, but I do recall when I was a young’n Seattle City Light charged less per KWh the more their industrial and commercial customers use. Now the rate tiers are flipped.
Jim Bales
I think this is a marginal effect, at best. Instead, I’m propose using your time and money to:
1. Persuade friends and neighbors to also shift over.
2. Lobby political leaders for policy changes to promote renewals
3. Campaign for and/or against political leaders based on their position on the topic
Best
Jim
PeakVT
I would say no. It’s a collective action problem. If everybody who signs up for a renewable offset uses extra, it will probably increase demand so much that it will force the utility to buy more from dirty sources in the short term, to spend money (and energy) on beefing up the grid, and to build more renewables – and thus using more land that could be used for something else or left open – than needed in the long term. Better to donate that extra bit to some charity building out renewables in the third world, or to a Democratic candidate with a strong green aspect to their campaign.
Another Scott
Category error, IMHO.
What one should do in that situation is elect officials (governor, etc.) who will appoint sensible people to the utility oversight boards and get them to reject such surcharges.
The government has no business promoting waste, especially when it comes to energy production and distribution. Such errors need to be fixed.
We’ve been destroying the climate because fossil fuels were far too cheap for far too long. Energy efficiency was a sucker’s bet for far too long. We need to reverse that thinking – meaning we need to encourage efficiency and conservation even as we move toward using a greater percentage of fossil-carbon-replacing power sources.
tl;dr – always try to use less, and try to get the bad incentives removed.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
catclub
@PeakVT:
yep. The Rocky Mountain Institute paper I read, on vastly increasing automobile fuel efficiency, concluded that people would drive more.
JGabriel
Alain @ Top:
I think biofuels are also considered ‘renewable” energy under a lot of state laws. If, IF, that’s the case, then profligate use of such renewables will still put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. Furthermore, wind, solar, and hydro all have their drawbacks too, though no where near as severe as burning fuels.
So, I think no matter what the source, it’s probably better to reduce energy usage in general.
MaxUtil
I don’t think this makes a lot of sense. In a theoretical construct, sure, you’re increasing demand for clean energy which will then encourage investment in developing clean energy resources, etc. etc. And maybe if you could get very large numbers of people to do this simultaneously you would have some kind of impact on utility’s decision making on investment and sourcing of their power. But I think it would take huge numbers of people to do this.
In the real world situation, a utility’s source mix is mainly determined by rules set by the state. Consumers selecting “green pwer” on their billing probably has a minuscule impact on moving their energy source mix requirements up or down. Because their sourcing and investment decisions are all on large scales, tiny swings in their mix mandate won’t change their decision making at all.
Furthermore, by using more power you are just soaking up the available renewable energy on the grid so the utility has to generate more dirty power to accommodate their demand. Some renewables can adjust their output based on demand (wind and hydro) while other can’t easily (solar, nuclear?). Utilities generally use gas fired “peaker” plants to accommodate spikes in demand. So while extra use of energy at the consumer level might drive “demand” for more renewables, it is also likely driving the need for utilities to maintain and operate peaker plants.
Beyond all that, I go back to an environmental principle I picked up by a smart writer somewhere (McKibbon?) If you have to do long, complex thought experiments and calculations to determine which of two options is better environmentally, it probably just doesn’t make much of any difference. Much better to focus your time, energy and resources on the many known ways that will have bigger impacts. For most of us, that comes down to supporting politicians and political movements that will push forward real environmental agendas. On a personal level, reduce your impact in simple, visible ways. Reduce your usage, ride a bike instead of driving one trip a week, etc. etc.
Victor Matheson
No, this isn’t correct. (And this is coming from a guy who teaches energy economics, but you can take this for what it’s worth.)
If you want to save the world with your energy choices, you want to minimize your carbon emissions. Buying into a renewable energy supplier eliminates or reduces your carbon emissions from electricity. So that is a good thing. However, once you have eliminated your electricity-based carbon emissions, using more clean energy doesn’t help anything. And while it is true that using more electricity will spur more investments in renewable electricity generation, since you are using all of the new, clean electricity, that doesn’t help reduce anyone else’s carbon emissions.
I don’t know of any research or economic theory that would suggest a spike in electricity usage will cause a spike in investment in renewables that will go beyond simply investing to meet the spike in demand. Again, using renewables is primarily useful only to the extent that they replace fossil fuels. Using renewables has little inherent benefit on its own.
MaxUtil
@trollhattan:
I think it is that Californians use about half the amount of “energy” on average compared to the rest of the country. But the vast majority of that is simply that we don’t use very much fuel heating homes and businesses over the winter. California is certainly a leader in some aspects of efficiency and policy. But we’re not that great in many ways (see: cars, usage of…)
Jager
5 years ago we spent a long weekend in a completely off-grid house. You would have never known we were 19 miles from the closest power pole. Solar electricity, propane fridge, water pumped by an electric pump. We were on the deck, ice in our drinks listening to Van Morrison on the audio system if you’d joined us you would have never known the house was off-grid.
boatboy_srq
Quantity vs quality w/r/t the consumer. It is more likely the number of consumers requesting renewable/clean power will be a more effective driver. Customer count is a bigger metric for a utility than individual customer usage.
Also, the utility will have to provision peak clean usage for forecastable need, not on your individual consumption, but on the mean residential customer, whose consumption is likely higher. Assuming the mean is 20% above yours and your fellows’ actual usage, 100x 1.2x your individual potential consumption as a utility capacity provisioning metric is a much more powerful motivator than even 2.5x your own individual actual consumption.
Tim C.
This is a collective problem as some people have said.
* The ideal path is to go as renewable as possible as quickly as possible on a global level.
* The quickest way to do this to economically reward renewables as much as possible.
* Likewise, it’s easier to fill customer demand if that demand is a small as possible.
(Side note that I would *REALLY* want Cheryl Rofer, or anyone else with deep inside professional knowledge to comment on is the usefulness of adding next generation fission power to the mix. Are thorium reactors really a possibility? is there a way to make safer or much safer reactors with current fuels? Cost mix on that compared to other technologies? If I missed a post on that over the years, getting directed to it would be great!)
PeakVT
@catclub: That’s Jevon’s paradox, which is somewhat different from what Alain is asking about. But all sorts of environmental issues run up against behavioral issues, which is why they are very hard to fix without long-term (several election cycles) intervention by a national government.
Victor Matheson
@catclub: There is a bounce-back effect from increasing efficiency leading to more driving. But I have never heard anyone suggest it it very large.
Just think of a back of the envelope calculation. The average gas mileage for passenger vehicles is roughly 25 mpg currently. The current cost of gas is roughly $2.50/gallon, so that is 10 cents of gasoline per mile. The IRS calculates the cost of operating a vehicle at 58 cents per mile (excluding the cost of your time.) So doubling the mileage of cars would only reduce the cost of driving by 5 cents per mile or less than 10%. Hard to believe this would cause a particularly large increase in driving while cutting gas consumption per mile driven in half.
Another Scott
@Tim C.: Not Cheryl, but TheBulletin:
Lots more at the link.
TANSTAAFL.
Cheers,
Scott.
PeakVT
@Tim C.: Next generation reactors are all basically theoretical at this point. Besides, there have been a lot of non-PWR/BWR reactors built over the past 60 years and none have been proven to be economically viable. The latest fad is SMRs, which are mostly just smaller PWRs with the promise of lower lead times (delays are a huge problem for the nuclear industry outside of highly directed economies).
Solar, wind, and efficiency are here, proven, and are approaching parity even without some form of carbon pricing. As far as I am concerned any new nuclear will be just an opportunity for large multinationals to grift on the public treasury.
MaxUtil
@Jager:
I don’t want to be the “well actually…” a-hole. But while this is technically ‘off grid’, that house relies on trucked in propane and presumably water pumped up from small scale ground water. It might be off grid, but it is neither efficient nor scalable. I only want to point that out because I run into people quite regularly talking about how we all need to return to some sort of agrarian, ‘off the grid’ lifestyle without realizing how this only works if you posit massive availability of pristine land with lots of ready resources that have never been tapped before. Cities are efficient. The wilderness is not unless you are living at barely subsistence level and still isn’t considering the reality of moving any significant number of people to that kind of lifestyle.
boatboy_srq
@Victor Matheson: The one problem with that calculation is that vehicle owners, outside fleet owners (or possibly lessees whose leases include limits on mileage), are very bad at tracking TCO and/or intangible per-mile incurred expenses. The routine maintenance generally gets overlooked in figuring the per-mile vehicle cost. The one exception is in the tech paradigm shift: Tesla owners make as much bank from eliminating 90% of their vehicles’ moving parts (and consequent service obligation) as they do from the vehicles’ efficiency.
The chief problem with efficiency costing is that once past the initial coal-rolling gas-hog level, efficiency gains are a diminishing returns game: going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg is significant, but you have to go from 20 to 40 to halve again and the benefit is half the first reduction, then 40 to 80, &c. Unless energy consumption per-mile suddenly approaches zero cost with one leap, the fiscal incentives become progressively weaker even though the efficiency becomes exponentially greater.
Another Scott
@MaxUtil: Along those lines, and similarly off-topic, I’m reminded of those who say that we should all eat wild-caught salmon and avoid farmed salmon. I disagree. The only way humanity will survive is by not putting so much stress on the oceans and natural ecosystems. That means smart, efficient, farming. There isn’t enough wild salmon left to feed everyone who might want it. Farmed salmon is the only sensible alternative.
Of course, the way the salmon are raised is another issue…
Yes, living off the grid, and living in a hut in Alaska, is great, but it’s only available to a tiny proportion of the population. It doesn’t serve as a role model for the vast majority of humanity.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@catclub:
Driving distance is heavily constrained by traffic conditions and driven (sorry) by commuting realities. Plus, compared to “back in the day” fuel costs comprise a smaller fraction of the price of operating a vehicle. I’m not paying any more for gas than I was a decade ago, but car, insurance, maintenance are all far higher, as is parking were I a car commuter (I’m not).
I doubt an F250 owner drives any less than a Prius owner because of shoveling in 4X as many dollars for that distance.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
A tricky part of farmed fish are those species like salmon and tuna that need to be fed other fish, meaning harvesting “unwanted” species, processing it into food, and raising desirable fish. Is this sustainable? IIUC catfish, tilapia and certain shrimp can be raised on non-fish based food, so can be raised sustainably.
bupalos
No no no no no. At least in thought experiment mode, where that extra load doesn’t offset other worse fossil demands. On the other hand, if you increase load by getting a plugin car or switching your heat to electric, the hopeful real-world case, then the answer could be yes.
But as theory, I think the answer is no, from a lot of angles. On the “building demand in the market” I don’t think it really works because I don’t think the utilities are primarily operating off that kind of data. It’s also worth remembering that the energy trading market is just an accounting fiction. I don’t really know that increasing renewable usage within that market doesn’t just mean shifting the way renewable generation is accounted for. It’s pretty complicated I think, when you go on one of those contracts you aren’t changing the source of the electricity your using, you’re mostly really just agreeing to pay a little more to have your name written down next to the existing renewable capacity. AFAIK the utilities can “increase” renewable available for this kind of accounting by simply removing the existing renewable portion from the accounting of customers who are not paying the premium. Until all customers not paying the premium have been purified to zero renewable content, it’s just accounting and never arrives at real world demand.
I think the upshot here is that it’s really inefficient, complicated, wasteful, and unpredictable to try and do this through “natural market forces” as routed through profit-driven utilities. And the first thing we all should be doing is changing our lifestyle rather than finding “one weird trick” to keep our wasteful ways viable.
Victor Matheson
@Tim C.: Energy economist here (or at least a teacher of energy economics), and here is my current sense of nuclear.
Nuclear (in all of its varieties) potentially works really well. And there are lots of both technical and economic/regulatory things that could make nuclear work even better. However, the cost of wind and solar, and the cost of storage, are getting so low, that it is hard to envision a realistic scenario where nuclear beats solar over most applications for new installations.
Given the fact that you can install rooftop solar on a million homes for roughly the same price as building a new nuclear plant that would generate a similar amount of power, why would one build the nuclear plant?
At this point, think of nuclear as landline phones. It’s a great technology that was incredibly useful for many years. And there are many things one could do today to make landlines better. But few people would advocate a massive spending push to go after the next generation of landline phones when there is a new and better and cheaper phone using mobile technology.
Pete Mack
The goal is to shut down dirty power, not use more clean. So conservation is always the way to go.
Victor Matheson
@boatboy_srq: Yeah, that’s fair. To be sure, if people fully internalized all of the costs of the long-term costs of operating their car, there would be a lot fewer Uber drivers.
That being said, while it’s true that each iteration of fuel efficiency becomes harder and harder, that also means the rebound effect becomes smaller and smaller with each iteration of fuel efficiency.
Jager
@MaxUtil:
Of course, it’s not a practical lifestyle for a majority of people, the house was on a piece of land 22 miles from Santa Maria, Ca. The “trucked” in propane was a single tank and the owner brought it home in the back of his SUV. My point was that there was little difference between the off-grid house and a house hooked up to the grid as far as lifestyle and convenience. If you’ve ever looked at a piece of rural land for a 2nd home or a retirement spot, you’d have a heart attack at the cost of attaching it to the grid. Cheaper and more efficient to go solar than to pay the power company big bucks to hook you up. BTW my grandparents didn’t get REA until 1949 on their farm. Grandpa bought a Wincharger system in the mid-20s, windmill outside batteries in the basement of the farmhouse. Worked perfectly almost 100 years ago.
catclub
@JGabriel:
But No NET carbon over the time period of the cycle from building the renewable fuel to burning the fuel. The problem with coal is that the carbon was taken out
of the atmosphere millions of years ago, but put back in today.
Martin
@trollhattan:
This, precisely. If the other 49 states were as energy efficient as Californians (and in the 70s, CA per capita energy use was in line with national averages) then you could immediately close every coal plant in the nation and not need any replacement.
This is not a fluke. CA’s energy marketplace works different from any other state. In CA electricity rates are regulated relative to how little power gets used by the utilities consumers. The idea is this: my utility convinces me to save $10 worth of electricity. Maybe they give me a rebate on an efficient appliance, or they give me a free LED light bulb. Whatever. When it’s time to do the rate assessment, the state looks at my $10 savings and assuming that’s part of a trend, they allow the utility to raise rates to recover about $5 of that savings. The $5 the utility recoups is what pays for my rebate or LED. I keep the other $5. If my neighbor doesn’t take advantage of these plans, their bill simply goes up by $5.
So, the utilities are motivated to sell less power. Provided they are not becoming unprofitable in the process, they’re okay with this because it also means they don’t need to issue debt to build new power plants which is risky for them. It’s sustained revenue and profits with minimal investment risk on their end. The consumers are motivated to use less power because our rates will go up if my neighbor uses less. I have a Trumpian neighbor that constantly bitches about their $300 power bills and has an ideological aversion to saving energy. Ok. that’s cool, dude, my monthly bill is $8 and I run my AC as much as he does but he paid for my rebates.
The result is that CA has the 3rd highest electricity rates in the nation, but the 4th lowest bills. And that’s by design. Consuming electricity (and by extension increasing emissions) is discouraged, but if you do your part, you’ll have low bills. The above rate system is compounded by mandates for renewables on the utilities, and a bunch of other stuff, so if they don’t do those things, they don’t get the rate increases.
In states that don’t have this kind of system, your goal is to starve your utility. Simply take as much of their revenue away, because they have no way to replace it. There’s really no need to signal what kind of power you want, solar and wind are now priced cheaper than coal and natural gas in nearly every market, so economics is doing the thing we want. Utilities will switch provided that the government isn’t subsidizing the fossil fuels (vote accordingly). You want to force that by reducing consumption. Any time they need to idle a fossil fuel plant they lose money because the plant still needs to be staffed. That’s the upside to renewables – the marginal cost is nearly zero. CA is massively overproducing power at certain times of the year and we’re paying neighboring states to take the power. Why? Because once you’ve paid for the capex it doesn’t cost you anything to overproduce.
CA’s new problem is figuring out good uses for that overproduction. Storing it is obvious, but there are lots of other solutions. Running desalination with the excess would be a big help with other problems. Dumping it into a reversible fuel cell is very promising. Basically, produce hydrogen through electrolysis when you have excess power, and then run that hydrogen through a fuel cell to produce power when your renewables are underperforming. If you overproduce hydrogen, you can use that for running vehicles and other things. The state is starting to look seriously at encouraging greenhousing and using the excess power that way. Increase yields per acre by an order of magnitude for many of our crops, reduce water consumption, reduce pesticide and fertilizer use. CA seems like an odd place to turn to greenhousing because we have so much agricultural land, but we also can make it cost effective faster than any other state.
A Ghost To Most
Too much thinking. The changeover is occurring. Enjoy the regular news releases about coal plants being retired early.
Martin
@Victor Matheson:
It works out to about $20/hr of car operation. So, for every hour you spend in the car, you spent $20 between acquiring the car, insuring it, maintaining it, and fueling it. You can do it for as little as $10/hr, but not much below that.
boatboy_srq
@Martin: re your tRumpet/MAGAt neighbors: isn’t it amusing how “Supply and Demand” is a commandment straight from Adam Smith himself – until it affects their Gun-Totin’-Capitalist-White-Jeebus-given right to conspicuous consumption?
Yutsano
All I know is that the state of Washington is shooting itself in the dick right now. They’re putting a surcharge on electric vehicles and hybrids to help pay for new charging stations around the state. This was stuck in a bill MEANT TO ENCOURAGE HYBRID/ELECTRIC VEHICLE USE!!! And yes it includes hybrids that don’t plug in. Arrogance and stupidity.
Mike in Pasadena
whenever renewables produce more energy than subscribers like you are using, utilities will use the “excess” energy from renewables to meet the demand of customers who do not pay extra for renewables. If you waste energy, the utility must generate or buy more energy from a variety of sources to meet the demand. Do not waste energy because you are likely to increase the amount of dirty fuels used to meet the aggregate demand of all customers.
mad citizen
A source I found ranks Cali bills 25th. (Saveonenergy)