I Read With Interest That TriMet Will Be Rolling Out “100 Percent Wind-Powered” Buses This Year. How Does That Work?

Will they have sails, like clipper ships?

(Wesley Lapointe)
By Marty Smith

I read with interest that TriMet will be rolling out "100 percent wind-powered" buses this year (Dr. Know, WW, Jan. 1, 2019). How does that work? Will they have sails, like clipper ships? Or will they be recharged by a generator connected to a windmill?—Prairie Schooner

Cute one, Prairie; don't quit your day job. As I suspect you already know, TriMet considers those buses to be wind-powered because, through a green-energy program called "Clean Wind," they essentially pay PGE for the right to say so.

If that makes it sound like I think such programs (there are many) are scams, they're not—at least, not in a bad way. They genuinely do grow the renewable energy market, just as advertised, and lots of very smart people from very well-regarded climate policy NGOs agree that they're an effective tool. But even so, things aren't quite as clear-cut as "100 percent wind-powered" makes them sound.

Here's the challenge: Obviously, there's not a separate power grid for renewable energy—we're all drawing from the same mix of clean and dirty power. So how can utility customers make sure they only use the clean portion? The answer is something called renewable energy credits, or RECs.

You can think of RECs as the good karma associated with renewable power. For every megawatt-hour of clean energy a provider generates—using wind turbines, for example—it receives one REC, which it can use to comply with local renewable energy standards. If it has already exceeded its renewables quota, it can sell their karma to someone who needs it more.

It sort of makes sense. You're notionally swapping clean for dirty energy back and forth around the grid, even though really it all comes out of the same bucket. As one EPA explainer video put it (perhaps too revealingly), "RECs allow you to claim that the electricity you use comes from renewable sources."

It's kind of a switcheroo, but at the end of the day, the total amount of clean energy paid for equals the total amount produced, so we're all good, right? Of course, by the same logic I could pay someone to eat an Impossible Burger every time I ate a Big Mac and still call myself a vegetarian, but we'll try not to think about that.

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