Has anybody come across this? https://global100restrategygroup.org/ It seems to be attracting some coverage.

It seems to be written by some reputable people and feels like something I should support, but I like to understand what it is I'm supporting, and I don't at the moment.

They make statements in their declaration which I'd like to believe but I can't find any links to evidence to back it all up. Does anybody else know where it is?

For example, "11 countries have reached or exceeded 100% renewable electricity". So which are those?

And the main claim is that we can and should go 100% renewable energy by 2030. So where are outline plans and costings for how to do that in USA, Europe, China, Russia, Australia etc etc?

Admire the enthusiasm, but lots of issues:

They conflate "energy" with "electricity". Many countries including UK are decarbonising electricity, but heating and transport energy are far behind and need more of the attention. Maybe better to increase electricity supply with gas-backed windfarms etc to quickly electrify industrial/domestic heating, then replace the gas with RE and storage over time, as UK plans to, rather than constrain the electricity supply to keep it all RE and so keep other users burning coal for heat and diesel for transport.

It is easy to take a small country or geographic area which is part of a continental grid, and artificially declare that small zone to be 100% renewable. For example my neighbour has a wind turbine which generates more electricity in a year than he uses, but on windy days he exports it to others and on calm days he imports coal-powered grid electricity. Is he 100% renewable? His electrons must supply a lot of my electricity, am I 100% renewable? You can do that with lots of small countries, most frequently Denmark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production working link

Doesn't include nuclear but does include biomass - are they green? Are they renewable? Are they low carbon? Lots of views on that.

Does include hydropower. Is building more hydro dams a good thing? Lots of views etc

2030 is obviously less than a decade away. Is it credible that sufficient RE could be built in that time to triple UK RE production and to keep the lights on all winter? Where is the solution to the storage problem? Is it credible that all petrol cars and gas boilers could be scrapped in 2035?What other national/global priorities have to be shelved to focus on achieving such a goal? Got to carry people with you and you'll put them off being green if they are shivering in the dark.

Posted By: djh"11 countries have reached or exceeded 100% renewable electricity". So which are those?

Posted By: WillInAberdeenIt is easy to take a small country or geographic area which is part of a continental grid, and artificially declare that small zone to be 100% renewable

Some websites are suggesting that Scotland is one of them....! No politics please

Along with Albania, Norway, Iceland, Bhutan, Ethiopia, DRCongo, Costa Rica, Tajikistan, Paraguay and Uruguay. All those have large hydro resources to balance their grids, and/or are inter-connected to other countries with fossil generation.

They have excluded other countries such as Sweden and France who could be said to have zero carbon electricity due to their nuclear power.

The criteria they used for Scotland is : averaged over a year, the total renewable generation exceeds the total electricity consumption.

Scotland just about met that, despite also generating gas power (which they seem to think was all exported to England) and relying heavily on fossil import from England to balance the intermittent renewables.

AIUI France generated enough nuclear and renewable power to exceed their national consumption, averaged over a year. So judged by the same standard they could claim to be zero carbon, despite also generating exporting and importing fossil power like Scotland does.

My original point was that by selectively drawing boundaries and setting criteria, it's possible to claim that a certain number of countries are 100% renewable... Doesn't necessarily stand much scrutiny! Doesn't extrapolate that all other countries could do the same, within this decade.

All progress in the right direction though

Posted By: WillInAberdeenaveraged over a year, the total renewable generation exceeds the total electricity consumption.

Our house has exceeded 100% renewable electricity!

Not that we should fall into the trap of saying that interconnection invalidates 100% renewable electricity generation. In fact it should reduce the storage and backup infrastructure required.

Posted by me on the Ripple thread: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/02/green-energy-tariff-renewable-deals

" some of the biggest energy suppliers in the market are offering renewable energy deals backed by certificates [REGOs] that appear to prove the origin of clean energy, but may only be green on paper..... "

Unfortunately DJH's electric is no more renewable (but also no less) than anyone else's on the GB grid, notwithstanding how many REGOs his supplier has bought, or not.

For every kWh of 'renewable' electricity that someone consumes (or self-consumes, or fails to export), they just displace a kWh of 'non-renewable' electricity off to somebody else, who wasn't conscientious enough to pay for 'renewable'. (Or gullible enough - my supplier claims to be 100% renewable and keeps pushing the price up, for the exact same electricity that everyone else gets!)

If you buy a windfarm or a PV panel, you don't get greener electricity than anybody else in Britain does, but you do make the entire GB grid a teeny tiny bit greener, which is nice for everyone :-)

The more we interconnect with the continental Europe grid, the harder it is to say that any of us can be 100% renewable, until all of Europe is! Which would also be nice.

Posted By: WillInAberdeen" some of the biggest energy suppliers in the market are offering renewable energy deals backed by certificates [REGOs] that appear to prove the origin of clean energy, but may only be green on paper..... "

Oddly perhaps, I've reached the opposite conclusion. I don't like it, but with the law as it stands, I believe the REGO status is the only thing that matters. If there's a REGO for the supply you buy, it's a green supply. If there isn't [because the REGO has been sold] then it isn't green, even if you can see a wire straight from the turbine or panel to your house.

The idea of a system to certify green generation seems like a good one to me. And it ought to work trouble-free and without controversy. But the flaw seems to be the ability to sell the certificates independently of the power, which introduces the possibility of double-counting. I haven't investigated to see if there's a good rationale, but on the face of it, it seems like a brain dead decision. However, given that the certificates exist and the rules are as they are, it appears that the only reasonable way to resolve the difficulty [apart from changing the law!] is to treat the REGOs as gospel and 'real world' claims as faulty.

But having said all that, I own a bunch of PV panels and in due course I will own enough of a turbine to cover my entire consumption and then some. So a case of do as I say not how I do, perhaps.

REGOs are almost worthless (literally) because supply far exceeds demand - something like 0.02p/ kWh. Supply increases each year, so there's more than enough for anyone who wants some. That price does nothing to incentivize new renewables, but probably wasn't intended to.

They are really more of an accounting token, to help government assess how much electricity was generated renewably during a year, rather than anything tangible about the electricity that you are actually supplied, which is the same mix for everyone on the grid.

They are sold separately from the power, to help the renewable generators access a wider range of buyers, not all want REGOs.

If you are on a 100% renewable tariff and the wind wasn't blowing today, they'd have to cut you off if there wasn't enough renewable electricity to go round. But instead, the supplier just sells you fossil kWh without REGOs today, and makes it up next week by buying some extra REGOs then, which had been separated from their associated kWh. That enables 100% renewable tariffs to exist.

But they don't actually prove that, do they :-)

If your lights stayed on overnight during calm weather, you know that wasn't renewable electricity. Yet your supplier waves a bunch of REGOs and claims that 'proves' it was 100% renewable. Someone is being a bit daft... either the supplier who claims that, or the consumer who believes them and pays extra for it!

And if you follow your wires down the street, you'd find you are getting the exact same electricity as everyone else, REGOs or not.

Posted By: djhThe supplier has the right to claim renewable since they bought the REGO

Ah, but that's the problem - they didn't buy the REGO on that still cold night when they were supplying everyone with fossil power. They actually bought a job lot of them, weeks or months later, on a sunny windy afternoon when there was loads of renewable electricity sloshing round the system. The REGOs don't have timestamps or even dates on them, just a year, and so long as they have collected enough REGOs by the end of the year then nobody is any the wiser!

Edit: I'd be interested how this works with storage, which we need more of. If say a pumped storage operator buys some midday solar power with associated REGOs, then with efficiency losses they will sell say 70-80% of the power back during the evening peak. Do they sell all the REGOs, or only 70% of them? What happens to the rest of them? How do they get rewarded for making the solar power available at a more useful time of day, anything other than the difference in power price?