Yea basically. Creative accounting abuses of RECs are rampant. There’s no tangible product or service delivered when you buy a REC so there’s nothing stopping a bad actor from selling the same “REC” to more than one buyer.
But more importantly, RECs don't work to reduce GHG emissions even if they’re purchased and sold in good faith. RECs don’t change anything, that’s the problem. They don’t reduce electricity usage, or change the grid mix. All RECs do is give a company the ability to claim that it was magically someone else’s electricity that resulted in fossil fuels being burned and not their’s. Companies that buy RECs are paying to shift the blame onto companies that didn’t.
Back when solar and wind was more expensive than fossil fuels it may have made sense to offer companies the option of paying extra to get “green” power that otherwise wouldn’t have made financial sense. But now that wind and solar are cheaper than coal and nat gas, utility providers will buy all available green power regardless of RECs.
The bottleneck to building more renewable power isn’t money. Companies paying for RECs aren’t making that happen any faster, they’re just Greenwashing their ESG reporting.
Such an incredibly misleading article.
1 GW of nuclear capacity generates several times more electricity than 1 GW of PV capacity.
Nuclear power plants run at almost full capacity pretty much 24/7/365. With the occasional shutdown every few years for maintenance and to replace the fuel rods.
PVs only generate electricity during the day, and only hit their maximum capacity under ideal conditions. The average output of PVs is 15-25% of their capacity.
Globally we generate more electricity from nuclear than we do from all PVs together.
At the typical sizes we’re building them you need dozens of PV farms to match the energy output of a single nuclear reactor.