Green Power Providers
The rise in the availability of power from green sources has been astronomic. The demand currently outstrips supply giving huge confidence to renewable energy providers to invest in massive projects. Just recently it was announced that a huge windfarm is to be established offshore and provide London with up to a quarter of its power. This sort of scheme was unthinkable only a few years ago.
What’s more, it is a truly global phenomenon. Every part of the developed world wants green power and they don’t mind paying for it as its price rapidly approaches the price of power generated by conventional means.Initially, green power was sold by fledgling power companies and environmental bodies. The RSPB for example, a bird conservancy group from the UK, sold power from renewable sources to the energy conscious and were swamped with demand. Other companies saw how popular this new energy was proving to be and jumped on the bandwagon. The same pattern was evident in other nations and the scale of alternative energy production grew enormously.
RENEWABLE ENERGY CERTIFICATESWhat has now emerged is a system of giving credits to energy produced from renewable resources. They are called Renewable Energy Certificates. The certificate says that the owner holds access to any number of MW of alternative power and these certificates are bought and sold. Certificates emerged because clarification was needed on who held which power and how much. The end user can now be sure that the power they are using comes from a renewable resource and that they are not using power that may have been ‘sold’ to somebody else. According to the US system there are different grades of green power and they also use Renewable Energy Certificates called ‘green tags’
1 comment:
Hi Roger,
Interesting to hear about RECs in the UK - I run a REC retail company called Village Green Energy in California. One interesting thing about the REC markets here, and I would be curious about in Europe, is that there are certain markets where utilities are required to buy them - for example, in California, the utilities buy them to try to become 20% renewable by 2010, as required by law. Voluntary buying from these states forces new renewables into the grid because the utilities must replace the purchase. But we've had problems because other states don't cause additional renewable energy onto the grid because the state laws requiring a certain percentage renewable don't exist.
Thanks for the post - always interesting to learn what people are doing with these issues around the world.
Mike Jackson
mike@villagegreenenergy.com
415 367 3484
www.villagegreenenergy.com
Post a Comment