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I kind of get the solar/wind power buyers who pay more. There are a smattering of people for whom paying extra for "renewable" power has some religious meaning even though the actual power they use may be from non-renewable sources. Fine. We salute your noble personal sacrifice for the cause of sustaining renewable energy.

What I completely don't get is why someone would be an *Apple" renewable power buyer. I see renewable as the basic "brand" here and don't understand why anyone would specify Apple power. Even device fandom doesn't explain it to me.

This looks mostly like a set of corporate constructs to lessen the regulatory burden and increase Apple's flexibility to both sell its excess power and maximize whatever financial advantages it has in terms of tax structure.

It seems to me like one of the weird side effects of massive profitability and lack of investment in product diversity or expansion is that some companies seem to be drifting into almost financial company status, where the business imperative shifts to structural tactics to expand profitability versus expanding the existing core business.

GE kind of did this a decade or so ago, where its finance unit became so important to the business that some people thought the company should be evaluated as a financial company not a manufacturer.

That's exactly what it is. Deregulation of the electricity market sent us on this path in many states. Deregulation created new job titles like "Energy Trader" and "Energy Market Analyst". Such people get paid very handsomely to play the energy market exactly as if it were a stock market.

Setting up a "power company" doesn't even require physical infrastructure of any kind anymore. You can set up the appropriate legal entities, purchase electricity in bulk wholesale, market your "service" to the public, and sell to individual consumers all from the comfort of your home office. The Texas electricity supplier market is full of such "paper" utilities. Every state is a little different, but that appears to be the mechanism by which Apple is doing this.

As far as I know, it is very unusual for a company to sell their excess power like this. A more common arrangement is to have a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), which is basically a contract to buy X MW-h at Y price for a term of Z years (10-20 years generally). Then, if the company has excess electricity, it sells to the grid at the wholesale price. There is often ample opportunity for making huge profits using this method since the PPA price can, and often is, much lower than market rate. This allows entities such as large hospitals to run on PPA power most of the time, use their emergency generators for emergencies, but also fire up their generators on days when the market electricity price is very high for extra cash. This type of structure is good for the market since it gives critical electricity users reliable and redundant power options, and also gives the grid excess emergency capacity.

As someone in the industry, this development of a company selling electricity directly to consumers is somewhat troubling. These "paper" utilities cause enough problems- many of them use confusing and predatory marketing and pricing plans. I truly believe we need to sort out those deregulation issues before we allow even more non-utility companies to enter the fray. Electricity used to be a trusted market, where people may have paid too much, but the pricing was honest and everyone generally got the same deal. All the nontraditional players entering the market are turning it into something more like the life insurance market where the sleaziest sales teams are the biggest winners.

if we assume that national governments are neutral in this, then they can place a proper value on that environmental cost

Wow, talk about begging the question. Are they neutral? Or will they happily (ab)use this power you propose we give them to reward supporters and punish opponents?

And even if they are free of any agenda — just how can they (or anyone) calculate these costs? The people, who can't keep almost any project within budget and on-time and are notorious for mishandling even the high-profile ones — you are going to trust them to calculate the incalculable?

BP's oil-spill was projected to cost almost $70 bln, for example — but ended up costing $20 bln. Which side would the government have erred on computing the costs of an oil-well ahead of time? And what would it do with the surplus, if the estimates turned out to be exaggerated?

If they can hand bucks to folks to generate power

Itself a shameful practice to be abolished...

Not really, if that becomes a problem, we'll just re-institute the ban on exporting oil from the US. We've done it before.

That's the sort of stupid I expect from someone who's doomed to repeat history. Hint: first you have to lift the existing ban, and, it didn't work last time either - because you're a bunch of greedy, deceitful, cheating, ignorant bastards (mostly).

Such designs are in use for one-man submersibles.

http://fuelfix.com/files/2012/04/OTCphotoLogo.jpg

Unlike the US, Germany does not have huge areas of spare, uninhibited land

That's okay, they can just buy natural gas on the open market. And it will be cheap because it is plentiful now.

toxic desserts

I think you meant "deserts".

uninhibited

I think you meant "uninhabited".

Anyway, you are mistaken: fracking does not cause land to be turned into toxic desert.

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2012/01/04/opinion-fracking-fears-mostly-unfounded/

I did not say that USA was NOT net energy importer, however USA is now selling refined products and this is what helped to reduce its monthly trade deficit a few months back.

Bloomberg: Oil Exports Trim U.S. Deficit as Fuel Gap Shrinks: Economy

Energy exports boosting US trade position

However my point remains, USA energy consumption is lowest in at least a decade, you can find various data on this subject, like this here, and here

Also oil imports are very low, here is a 2013 story talking about lowest oil imports into USA in 25 year span.

My point is that USA is too poor to keep using more or even equal amount of fuel that it used to in the recent decade(s) and it's going to progress even faster from now and the fact that oil prices are going up has nothing to do with USA lack demand, it has everything to do with inflation, which eventually will allow foreign consumers to buy much more energy products than today as the inflation will hit USA home and USA MAY become a net energy exporter at least for a while.

Diesel is tax-advantaged in Europe so our diesel is shipped there to fetch a better price (more demand). The US in fact is shipping an awful lot of refined petroleum products, and IIRC is at or near the top of export revenues:

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/12/02/fuel-exports-up-and-so-is-the-cost-at-the-pump/

You mean like this?

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/BF822DDBEC29C0DC852577BB005BAC0F
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/05/10/ethanol-mess-with-your-engine-you-may-be-on-your-own/

Where I currently live we've regularly had gas stations caught selling gas that was 12-13% Ethanol coming from disreputable refineries. It happens all over the country.

And causes problems.