Fixing everything, really slowly

Melanie’s Bean Sprouts blog makes for interesting reading if you are interested in practical things to help the environment. Having changed our electricity supplier last year to npower’s Juice tarif I had assumed I was buying electricity from 100% renewable sources. It turns out I’m not …

Bean Sprouts – Melanie Rimmer

[..]

… The electricity companies’ implication is that if you’re on a green tarriff, they input as much extra renewable energy into the grid as you use (making your use effectively “green”). But this isn’t the case. In reality, the companies generate as much power as they can sell to the grid at any given time, period. So your decision to go on a “green” tarriff makes no difference to the power generated – it’s still 4.2% renewable, and nothing has changed unless the supplier is bringing new renewable plant onstream with your money. And there’s the key; most of the companies offering “green” tarriffs aren’t doing that.

[..]

It’s not all doom and gloom though …

… if you want to change your electricity supplier because you’re concerned about climate change, it’s important to choose a supplier which invests in new renewable energy projects.

Fortunately there is a website to help you do just that. It is http://www.whichgreen.org/. I have included the latest figures from them as the image in the top left of this article. As you can see, Ecotricity comes top of the league by a long way.

[..]

Like Melanie I’m currently using npower, which actually wasn’t too bad a few years back, but now sucks. I just wish I didn’t have to fill in a load of forms and talk to people to switch suppliers.