[zurn]

Electricity is fungible, so when big operators buy wind-only power from the market, the rest of the demand uses the non-green power left in the pool.

(It still potentially increases wind buildout so it can have indirect positive impact especially if wind is not competitive at the same prices with fossils)

Also the accounting is "we bought as many MWh of wind power as we used" over some time window, so in reality they are using fossil power in peaks, competing with everyone else and placing pressure to expand fossil based capacity.

These are also the reasons it's probably better to talk about the electricity used instead of trying to translate it to emissions by proxy, which is prone to being gamed due to abovementioned reasons.

(Also the number is high rather than low if you consider that all the individual slices of the emisison pie at this subdivision granularity are pretty small)

[thehappypm]

Electricity is a little less fungible than folks make it out to be.

Iceland, for example, has abundant energy from various sources such as geothermal. However, that energy is not easy to send across the ocean to consumers. So, Iceland instead smelts a lot of aluminum, which takes a lot of energy, and is far easier to export cost-effectively.

So a kWh produced in Iceland is not exactly the same as a kWh produced in Germany; it's not truly fungible.

In that vein, datacenters are often placed in such areas. One at Microsoft for example is in Wyoming, near a hydro dam that is far from any dense population.

[reacharavindh]

Yeah. There are lot of such “feel good”, technically true, but not logically expected reporting. The solar panels on my roof generate a lot of electricity while I’m not home, and not really using it, but I feed into the grid, and pull when I need it(when the sun is not shining). I can’t boast that my energy is so renewable that I can start mining bitcoins at home - that’d be stupid.