As the high-speed railway linking London, Kent and the Channel Tunnel, HS1 has revealed it is on track to becoming the first UK railway to run entirely on renewable energy. Wind and solar power lie at the heart of a procurement process that is already underway to ensure the only high-speed railway in the country runs solely on sustainable power.
HS1 says it has secured so-called Renewable Electricity Guarantee of Origin (REGO) certificates, from its electricity supplier, npower Business Solutions, enabling it to report zero-carbon emissions for the electricity used to power trains and stations.
As a business it has also pledged to be fully carbon neutral within a decade, as set out in stringent new environmental targets in our its sustainability strategy, which focusses on enhancing HS1’s reputation as the Green Gateway to Europe.
HS1 continues to work with its international operator, Eurostar, and domestic operator Southeastern High Speed (LSER) to reduce the carbon footprint of every passenger by 25% and to cut energy per train journey by 10%.
I do not accept this certificate trade amounts to demonstration that an electricity consumer is using “only” renewable power, for numerous reasons. Key are that the actions of individual consumers in “buying” this “renewable attribution” have almost no effect on the investment and generation decisions of providers, which are largely determined by matters outside individual consumers’ control. And the trade is ignored when it comes to attributing renewable electricity use by statisticians responsible for assessing international performance.
In more detail:
– There is no matching of moment of generation to moment of consumption. A lot of the time the amount of people claiming to be consuming only renewable power will greatly exceed the quantity available at that moment, and at other times there is a huge glut of it. What electricity are you using at those numerous times of shortfall?
– There is no consideration of whether transmission constraints make it realistic those kWh were deliverable to you. There is a substantial international trade in certificates – eg Norway and Italy are major certificate exporters, and international interconnector capacity has to be booked for international transfers, but no one books capacity for the certificates. It also applies within nations, as there are transmission constraints nationally also. Did that Scottish wind power really power the HS2 south of the Midlands transmission constraint?
– These certificate sales are largely irrelevant to the generator decision to invest or to generate. They are just a little sugar on top of the main financial mechanisms.
– At an international level, it is not considered that the certificate trade changes the attribution of renewables. Countries have their own targets for renewable generation, but the fact that they are importing or exporting certificates does not affect the accounting for their performance against those targets. If it did, then I think the exporting of certificates would be stopped pretty much instantly. Countries have expensively encouraged renewables, and for that “virtue” to be sold off cheap would be intolerable and put a stop to if it actually counted.
So, this is really a trade in perceptions of virtue, not a trade in renewable electricity.