This is why green electricity is not 100% clean energy

Today I propose you a little puzzle:

Let’s say we are faced with one airtight room with an oxygen indicator outside the door. This meter detects the average oxygen level inside the room, which is 20%. The value corresponds to the concentration of oxygen in the external environment, therefore in perfect living conditions. Opening the door, however, there is a person lying on the floor and bluish in color, evidently dead of suffocation. What happened to her?

The room it was initially filled with pure oxygen – it is possible to live there, even if in the long run it is not very healthy -. But after a few hours, all the oxygen in the room was consumed and replaced by the CO2 in the exhaled air. At that point, breathing became very tiring.

The interesting thing, however, is this: all in all, in terms of overall balance the average oxygen content for the whole period of time it was ok, always kept in the safety levels. But that didn’t help the poor guy at all, because “overall balance” is a purely statistical consideration that doesn’t work in practice.

This is exactly what happens with low-carbon electricity – green electricity. Even today, in almost all cases this is a low cost labeling scam, because it is green only in terms of the overall budget, and usually only in terms of the “overall annual budget”. This becomes particularly evident if we consider, for example, a solar installation in our European latitudes. In the summer, during the daylight hours, the plant will provide much more energy than we can use, while in February the roof panels produce almost nothing and at night do not produce at all. We can continue to lie to ourselves about fueling our electric car with home-grown green energy. In reality, however, during the day we contribute to injecting too much energy into the electricity grid, while at night we recharge our car, obviously with energy that is anything but clean.

What many still don’t know is that self-produced energy must be fed into the grid at the same time it is consumed. So, if we want to recharge our car in an environmentally friendly way, we need to resort to controllable green energy sources, such as hydroelectricity, or intelligently store our electricity from renewable sources. This can be done on a daily basis with a domestic energy storage, but seasonally only with a central storage facility, for example by converting the energy into hydrogen.

The decisive factor, however, is that the population first acquires awareness that the simultaneity of energy input and consumption is what makes electricity truly green. To make this process visible and verifiable, a certificate has recently been introduced for power plants and energy suppliers: www.truetime-certificate.com. It was established as a non-profit organization and is finally a first step in the right direction, which I also personally support.

If you also think the energy transition it will only be successful if we stop deceiving ourselves, then please join us and help make more and more people strive to achieve simultaneity.

This column is edited by Christoph Erni, founder and CEO of Juice Technology AG, a Swiss manufacturer of charging stations and solutions. He has always had a practical inclination, so much so that he left school shortly before graduating from high school to take a business administration course at university, and then moved on to the IT sector soon after. But this was not enough for Christoph Erni: he wanted more! About 20 years ago he founded his own business consulting firm, Erni Associates AG.

In 2014, noticing the lack of suitable charging solutions, he decided to enter the manufacturing sector and founded Juice Technology AG. In its first year of operation, the company secured pole position in this segment with the 22 kW Juice Booster 1 portable charging station, and has remained there ever since.

Christoph Ernifounder and CEO of Juice Technology