this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
443 points (98.9% liked)

Mildly Interesting

17388 readers
269 users here now

This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] JDubbleu@programming.dev 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

AFAIK, and I could be wrong, the one for SF is not just purchasing credits, but electricity from local power suppliers. I believe the way it works here is a certain percentage of electricity is supplied by the renewable energy partners and PG&E is responsible for the remaining percentage. This percentage is based on the number of people who have elected to go the green power route. Obviously they can't do this on the fly due to how power generation and grids work, but on a month long scale they have more than enough time to modulate generation sources to get close enough.

So let's say 60% of people are signed up for the program. They'll get roughly 60% of the city's power from the renewable sources they have, and allow PG&E to generate the rest. Sure the transmission of power to my place isn't going to be 100% renewable, but that doesn't matter as someone who is on the non-renewable plan somewhere will receive the renewable generated power anyway, so the net effect is the same, and I still get cheaper electricity generation charges.