There are complexities and complications aplenty for cities that have taken on this ambitious goal. It begins with clearly distinguishing between renewable electricity and renewable energy. (The former is a small subset; the latter also includes transportation and heat energy from liquid fossil fuels.) Another is establishing a system of tracking energy that does not “double count” electrons, so that two different entities can’t claim to be consuming the same clean energy. Another is whether to involve utilities in these city efforts, or whether cities should try to bypass them. [...]
The way the market works is (longer description here): When an individual or city contributes to the generation of renewable energy, it gets credit for that renewable energy. If it buys enough renewable energy to cover its consumption, it can claim to be “consuming 100 percent renewable energy.”[...]
It is not the most elegant solution, of course. In an actual market economy, consumers would choose their own electricity sources directly; that would make tracking easy. But the utility sector is not a market economy; it’s a quasi-socialist, semi-monopolistic Rube Goldberg contraption. [...]
Flexibility will come, in the near term, from natural gas. In the longer term, it will come from dispatchable renewable sources (geothermal, small-run hydro, possibly some biomass), storage, load shifting, efficiency, and conservation. To get to 100 percent carbon-free electricity, we might need some nuclear power (especially the small modular kind). We might need carbon capture and sequestration, most likely attached to biomass and maybe natural gas.
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