Having a grid makes it pretty difficult to "buy clean energy" because all generation is sort of laundered together. If you pay for a clean energy supplier, obv

Having a grid makes it pretty difficult to "buy clean energy" because all generation is sort of laundered together. If you pay for a clean energy supplier, obviously there is no way to force that you only get electrons pushed by solar or whatever. You could change your supplier from week to week and nothing in the grid infra changes. But the market overall determines who can sell power, so if nobody wants to buy from coal, the coal plants won't get paid (or it becomes financially unviable to generate). If you have on-site generation then this is a bit different because you can at least reduce your grid consumption. But otherwise it's not hugely different to buying carbon offset credits and assuming the trees will exist in 100 years.