100% green electricity is often 100% dirt today

Today, we have a small brain teaser:

You stand before an airtight room with an oxygen indicator outside the door. This shows the average value inside the room, which is currently at 20%. That corresponds to the concentration in the open air, perfect living conditions, in other words. Now you open the door and find a blue-tinged person on the floor, obviously suffocated. What happened?

Correct: The room was initially filled with pure oxygen. One can live in that environment, though it is not very healthy in the long run. But after a few hours, the person had breathed all the oxygen out of the room and filled it with their exhaled CO2. Subsequently, it became very unpleasant.

But, and this is interesting: As a whole – meaning on average over the entire time – the amount of oxygen was in the safe range. This didn't help the poor guy at all, though, because "on average" is a purely statistical consideration that does not work in practice.

It's almost exactly the same with green energy. To this day, in nearly all cases, it's a cheap trick. Because it is green only on average, often even just “annual average.” This becomes particularly obvious when you consider, for example, a home solar system in our latitudes. It delivers much more electricity during the day in summer than we can use – while in February almost nothing and at night nothing at all comes down from the roof. We can delude ourselves for a long time about how we “on average” charge our car with self-made green electricity. In reality, we are significantly contributing to the over-supply of electricity during the day, while at night we charge our car – naturally, then with very non-green coal power.

What many are not yet aware of: Electricity must be fed into the grid at the same second it is consumed. So, if we want to charge our car green, we need to rely on controllable green energy sources like hydropower – or cleverly store our own electricity from renewable sources. This can be done on a daily basis with a home battery, and seasonally probably only through central storage, such as via conversion to hydrogen.

However, the crucial point is that the general public first becomes aware that this simultaneity of feed-in and consumption is what truly makes electricity green. To make this visible and verifiable, there is now a new certificate for power plants and energy providers regarding this: www.truetime-certificate.com. Founded as a non-profit organization, this is finally a first good step in the right direction, which I also personally support.

If you also believe that we can only achieve the energy transition if we stop deluding ourselves, please help ensure that more people strive for simultaneity.