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Amazon Battles Google for Renewable Energy Crown (bloomberg.com)
Readers share a report: Even in the age of coal enthusiast President Donald Trump, clean-energy developers are finding plenty of interest in wind and solar power from businesses with sustainability targets, especially technology companies. That was on display in a video tweeted Thursday by Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, as he christened the 253-megawatt Amazon Wind Farm Texas in Scurry County. Amazon has bought more than 1.22 gigawatts of output to date from U.S. clean-energy projects, second only to Alphabet's Google, with 1.85 gigawatts. Corporations have agreed to buy 1.9 gigawatts of clean power in the U.S. this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and are on pace to match the 2.6 gigawatts signed last year.
What happens when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, does a coal plant gets shut down? No. What happen is that the typical home customer has its share of green power reduced from say, 4% to 3%. The production remains the same. What matters is the total emissions of the country, divided by its population. The US continue to be one of the worst.
Yes, its all just an accounting game. As long as the amount of renewable energy generated during the course of the year is as much as the total the companies claim is 'earmarked' to them, then there is no additional 'green' energy generated due to these arrangements. They make good PR for the companies though. In reality, they are using energy generated from coal and gas just like their neighbors.
What happens when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, does a coal plant gets shut down? No. What happen is that the typical home customer has its share of green power reduced from say, 4% to 3%. The production remains the same.
No.
What happens is, with a guaranteed customer with concentrated loads (and no need to cut a deal with a power distribution company to sell THEM the power), an investor builds renewable-energy plants near the Amazon or Google sites and starts selling them the power. So more generation DOES get built for the projects, and the consumers' mix is not impacted as you describe.
(In the short run such big projects may push the price of equipment up slightly, but in the long run they enable economy-of-scale manufacturing that brings the price down.)
Photovoltic panels, for instance, beat grid power once they cost less than a dollar per watt. Market price in 10-panel pallet loads was $0.33 last I looked, and even the domestic panel manufacturers who won the anti-dumping decision are only asking for a price floor of $0.78.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's totally incorrect. You're only focusing on emissions (a byproduct of consumption), without considering utility. You aren't considering what was achieved using the energy obtained by each unit of per-capita greenhouse gas emission!
It's a feature, not a bug.
Even if we double the utility (GDP, GNP, whatever) of the planet, we can't double our CO2 emissions.
I would also point out that if we double the population of the planet, we can't double our CO2 emissions and this is also true. So the CO2 per capita metric is only valid as long as the population of the planet remains the same. When the population increase, the CO2 per capita of all countries should be reduced too, but you get the idea.
Now, rich countries with high GDP per capita should be free to buy emissions credit from poorer countries emitting a lot less per capita. Let's let the market decide what is the most efficient way to use CO2. But we can't let the market decide what level of CO2 is sustainable for the planet.
You stop prematurely, and thus totally miss out on the economic aspect of this issue.
I am pretty sure we both understand the economic aspect of this issue. The problem is, you can't face the consequences, which are that rich countries, in which we probably both live, have to reduce CO2 emissions by a wide margin.