President Trump told CPAC attendees on Saturday, “When I look at what’s happening on the other side, I encourage it. … Is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.” The president was making a fundamental and inarguable point. No one can rely 100 percent on renewable energy because it’s not available anywhere close to 100 percent of the time.
Thanks to the “Green New Deal,” energy (or rather the lack of it) will be one of the top three issues in the 2020 election. Yet the president will go into this fight with one arm tied behind his back. More than 100 corporations are committed to going 100 percent renewable, including Bloomberg, Facebook, Google, Nike, and Starbucks, aided and abetted by the federal government validating spurious claims of renewable energy usage.
“We proved that 100 percent renewable is 100 percent doable,” Apple boasts. Only it hasn’t done anything of the sort. Apple’s 2018 environmental report gave a more nuanced version, shading its claim down to 100 percent of its electricity being “covered” by renewable energy. Two years ago, Alex Epstein, author of the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, wrote an analysis for Forbes debunking Apple’s claim of 100 percent renewable energy for its energy-guzzling data centers. “This is highly misleading,” Epstein charged. The claim was an artifact of two types of “energy accounting sleight-of-hand.”
Rather than 100 percent, an overwhelming percentage of Apple’s energy came from coal and almost none from wind and solar. What Epstein called Apple’s “blatant chicanery” depends on two gambits. First, it counts electricity produced from its solar farms but sold to the local grid as energy Apple consumes. Second, it buys green credits in the form of Renewable Energy Certificates for the renewable power consumed by others to acquire green bragging rights.
Apple’s reaction to the Forbes piece is instructive. It didn’t publicly challenge Epstein’s analysis because it couldn’t. Instead, its PR machine leaned on Forbes to disavow the piece. Forbes stood its ground. After re-examining Epstein’s analysis, the piece went back up five days later.
Not everyone has embraced the REC deception. “There is a difference between purchasing RECs and actually using renewable electricity,” IBM says. It disavows the purchase of unbundled RECs, which it calls an “accounting mechanism” used by companies that do not physically consume those renewables. Unlike Apple, IBM’s reporting transparency extends to identifying electricity consumption where renewable electricity is generated in the same grid region and, crucially, at the exact same time it is used.
This is where Energy Secretary Rick Perry needs to act. Far from getting corporations to clean up phony claims of 100 percent reliance on renewable energy, his department has been complicit in promoting and validating these designed-to-mislead renewable claims by giving its seal of approval to RECs. Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory describes RECs as “the way to show you are using renewable energy,” which isn’t accurate.
More truthfully, the Federal Energy Management Program, another DOE agency, states: “RECs are not electricity; instead, RECs represent the environmental attributes of renewable energy generation and can be bought or sold separately from the electricity.” Cut through the waffle and it’s clear that RECs are really FECs, Fake Energy Certificates, indicating nothing about the source of energy actually consumed by the businesses flaunting them.
“I believe the most sacred thing each of us is given is our judgment,” Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in December. “Our morality. Our own innate desire to separate right from wrong.” How true. Cook’s answer to fake news, which he says is poisoning people’s minds, is a modern version of a public-service announcement campaign. There is no more urgent place to start than cleaning up the systematic misleading of the public by many of America’s leading corporations, supported by the federal government, with their bogus claims of 100 percent renewable usage.
Electricity is unique. It must be produced the instant it is consumed. It is hard to escape the conclusion that RECs are a fraudulent misrepresentation of the physics of electricity generation and consumption. Rick Perry should say so and acknowledge the federal government’s role in promoting Renewable Energy Certificates as something other than what they are: fake.
Rupert Darwall is the author of Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex, the paperback edition being published on March 27th.
