At the moment, ‘green electricity’, as has been sold for years by sustainable energy suppliers, is mainly a financial product. It ensures that electricity consumed under the ‘green contract’ is neatly settled with producers of green electricity.
This certificate trading has a genuine intention. It maintains solar parks, wind turbines and hydroelectric power stations, and makes new investments in them possible.
But when we talk about hard CO2 molecules that end up in the atmosphere and cause accelerated climate change, there is still a lot of ‘grey’ (fossil) electricity in the mix. There are smarter ways to ensure that the electricity you use is truly as green as possible.
Such as consuming electricity at the right times.
Green Electricity
The electricity network itself does not actually distinguish between green or grey electricity: when you plug into the socket, you get a mix of all electricity that is present in the network at that moment.
That’s not the best solution. You can actually use the electricity best from a sustainability perspective at times when the sun is shining. A little good planning can have enormous consequences for the actual emissions of your household or business. That good planning is difficult, because wind, water and solar power are sometimes not available and sometimes in abundance.
By paying close attention to the market situation and the weather, you can significantly green your electricity consumption.
Clean electricity
The solution we can already use today? Charge cars as much as possible when the sun shines or the wind blows.
What Stekker tries to do with smart charging of cars is to charge at times when the sun shines and the wind blows. That data comes from market data, weather forecasts and other public data.
At those times, you can use smart software to make sure that cars start charging, washing machines start running and air conditioners start cooling or heating the house. In this way, you then use electricity that is truly green, instead of grey electricity that is only generated via a certificate.
Nowadays, sustainable electricity is already cheap electricity. After all, no fuel needs to be consumed: you only have to build a solar panel once, and then electricity flows onto the grid for 20 years, as long as the sun shines on it.
How do we capture the peaks of green electricity?
Thanks to the large-scale rollout of solar energy and wind energy, things have been going well lately with the supply of green electricity. An accompanying problem is that the power grid now sometimes becomes a bit unstable from it. At those times, the electricity grid is so overstretched that this clean electricity is not only very clean, but also incredibly cheap: on days when the sun shines and the wind blows, electricity is now often so cheap that you sometimes even get money to consume it. Sometimes this electricity is even uselessly burned away.
The electricity grid – all cables, transformer substations and high voltage pylons together – must always be in perfect balance. Does too little electricity come onto the grid? Then devices fail. Does too much electricity come onto the grid? Then the voltage rises and at some point devices will shut down.
We don’t want that. It would be much better if we could store those peaks in cars, which are standing still in a parking lot or somewhere along a street most of the time anyway.
By smartly dealing with a series of electric cars that are linked as a virtual battery, we can relieve the grid, use more sustainable electricity and – if they have the right contract – sometimes even consume free electricity.
