Can I buy renewable electricity?

From “Ask Andy” in the August 2009 newsletter, with links and more information.

Tariffs

About 5% of the electricity in the UK is generated from renewable sources, mostly wind, hydro and biogas from landfill. Generators sell this to electricity supply companies, who sell power to you and me. Each supply company has to publish the sources and CO2 content of their purchases, and this can be found on their websites. It is a complex market and every green offering is different:

Good Energy only buy from renewable sources.

Ecotricity, generate some of their own renewables (they own the turbine at the Eco Tech Centre at Swaffham) but also buy a lot of dirty electricity. Some of their income is used to invest in new projects.

GreenEnergy buy a lot of renewables and also a lot of electricity from natural gas, but no nuclear

All energy supply companies are obliged to provide a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. Many of them have invented tariffs that package this separately. The rest of their customers are not told that their electricity is dirtier than normal. Some also make donations to charity.

British gas have a 100% carbon free tariff, even though their electricity is no cleaner than the average. They actually offset the CO2, in the same way as we are told we can offset our flying.

You cant buy ‘renewable’ gas. However, British Gas will offset the CO2 component for you, as will Ebico, who are charity who also work on reducing fuel poverty.

Much of this information comes from greenelectricity.org

Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROC).

When generators produce renewable electricity, they are offered a ROC. If a supplier does not meet the percentage of renewable electricity required by the renewable obligation they have to buy ROCs to make it up. Its a kind of offsetting. Some green tariffs include a contribution to promoting renewable electricity by ‘retiring’ ROCs, which means they scrap them so that they are not available to suppliers to offset their obligation.

Why not offset?

CCF has always been dubious about the value of ‘offset’ schemes, as explained in the Carbon Conversations Handbook.

Carbon-offsetting schemes offer to compensate for the carbon you have emitted by offsetting it against carbon that is saved elsewhere. When you take a flight, you pay for a tree to be planted, or for energy-efficient light bulbs, or for more efficient cooking stoves in one of the poorer countries in the world. The projects themselves may be worthwhile but there is little to suggest that they compensate in any meaningful way for your emissions.

There are several arguments against carbon offsetting.

There is no easy way for consumers to judge the quality of carbon-offsetting schemes; there are no legal standards and it is an unregulated market. For an offset scheme to be effective, it must fund activities that would not otherwise have taken place – they must be

additional. It is particularly difficult to prove ‘additionality’ and few schemes meet this standard satisfactorily.

Carbon-offsetting schemes are ethically questionable: they shift the burden of reducing CO2 emissions to other people, other places or other times. If you fly to New York today, your trail of gas starts warming the planet immediately. A tree you order to be planted will take 50–100 years to absorb enough CO2 to offset the fuel your flight burned.

Some carbon-offsetting schemes may damage local ecosystems and communities, depending on how they are designed, owned and managed.

Offsetting is just another way to carry on consuming.

We are not the only ones who think this way. Both Greenpeace and FOE have criticised the idea, although WWF support validated schemes.

For an alternative view see Cheatneutral

A better option may be to cut out the middle-man and donate your ‘off set’ money directly to an appropriate charity. see

or for development projects

Another alterative is join a carbon reduction and trading scheme, where you can give your cash to help others reduce their carbon footprint.