[good_gnu]

In (1) you assume that people buy green energy mainly or to a large extent to reduce the emissions they personally suffer from. Have you considered that a big reason for many people to buy green energy might just be to provide incentives for green energy production in order to combat emissions globally without regard for whether they personally benefit from it? If everyone consumes energy "covered" by certificates, this increases viability of producing green energy.

In (2) you say that the scheme is likely to be gamed. Can you elaborate on how that would look like? Does this "Occam's razor" necessarily mean that only simple laws are effective?

Also in (2) you claim that there is not enough real green energy available to satisfy the demand. This is obviously true but this means that the demand creates an incentive for companies to produce green energy wherever possible.

Overall what this system really provides is an option for consumers to optionally subsidize green energy producing companies and so far I have not really heard of any concrete case in which this system has been gamed. Do you know any?

[98272109]

I don't feel like discussing this any further after the usual stupid down-voting and rationalizations.

Go and continue to believe that the world is just, no gaming of the system occurs, as clueless and highly paid A12-A16 civil servants [1] have told you in school.

[1] German teachers are paid well in return for their indoctrination.

[good_gnu]

So, basically you believe that people are gaming the system but you have no examples of how this happens or which companies might be doing this?

[919182391]

Well, if the down-voters are unable to operate Google-search (as expected), here is one of the first links:

http://www.energieverbraucher.de/de/gruener-strom__377/

[good_gnu]

So now after 3 layers of us trying to coax you into giving us a little bit more concrete detail on your argument, you link an article in German which a lot of people here cannot read?

Anyway, the article's argument is that the certificates for renewable energy are created in e.g. Norway and Switzerland where it is easy to produce cheap hydropower which cannot be transported to Germany. Meanwhile the Norwegian and Swiss do not buy energy with certificates because they "know" that their energy is clean.

This is indeed true and a valid argument. However Norway and Switzerland produce only a finite amount of these certificates. If demand for certified green energy does not exceed this supply then this is simply a sign that not enough people are willing to pay extra for certified green energy which is regrettable but not a fault of this system.

[0991823791]

Many teachers here on HN who think they are programmers while they're only "Lehramt".

I'm not surprised by the low quality of discussion.