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they're doing this financially, not through infrastructure building. the plan is to purchase equivalent dollar value of credits from renewable electricity suppl

they're doing this financially, not through infrastructure building. the plan is to purchase equivalent dollar value of credits from renewable electricity suppliers. this highlights a significant issue: grid power is fungible and power sources are indistinct from the end-user's point of view. is there some kind of auditing authority that can actually guarantee that the money spent is actually going towards electrical generation and isn't just slush-fund cash that financial holding companies play around with while nominally saying "green energy"?

syncsynchalt 10y ago
There's a REC market, and "production" of those certificates is tied 1:1 to input into the grid, which is metered and monitored by the applicable interconnect (as a necessity for its operation). When you purchase these renewable energy credits you're essentially bidding up a bonus for producers of the appropriate energy, above and beyond the price they got for the electricity itself. Google has entered some long-term contracts for the acquisition of these credits from renewable energy providers, which in the short term bids up the price of credits for everyone else and in the longer term leads to more and larger renewable energy producers. Also note that Google isn't doing this entirely via the credits markets — it's also reducing its usage and where applicable is working with energy providers to create nearby generation.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
The technical term for this is "additionality", making sure they pay to add renewable capability, not just use up a share of the renewable energy that was already being produced and Google accounts for it when planning their purchases. They give some details on this here: https://blog.google/topics/environment/google-green-blog-what-it-means-to-be_8/ https://blog.google/topics/environment/google-green-blog-wha...

syncsynchalt 10y ago

There's a REC market, and "production" of those certificates is tied 1:1 to input into the grid, which is metered and monitored by the applicable interconnect (as a necessity for its operation). When you purchase these renewable energy credits you're essentially bidding up a bonus for producers of the appropriate energy, above and beyond the price they got for the electricity itself. Google has entered some long-term contracts for the acquisition of these credits from renewable energy providers, which in the short term bids up the price of credits for everyone else and in the longer term leads to more and larger renewable energy producers. Also note that Google isn't doing this entirely via the credits markets — it's also reducing its usage and where applicable is working with energy providers to create nearby generation.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

The technical term for this is "additionality", making sure they pay to add renewable capability, not just use up a share of the renewable energy that was already being produced and Google accounts for it when planning their purchases. They give some details on this here: https://blog.google/topics/environment/google-green-blog-what-it-means-to-be_8/ https://blog.google/topics/environment/google-green-blog-wha...