How renewable is your energy tariff?
Looking for the UK’s greenest energy tariff? Discover what these latest rankings reveal about UK suppliers and real-time energy matching.
I’m on a 100% renewable electricity tariff: That should mean that my home’s energy is coming from renewable electricity in near-real time, right?
Wrong.
The results of the latest Matched Clean Power Index are in, and they tell a very different story to the claims made by the big household names.
In this article, we explain how renewable your energy tariff really is, and why matching renewable power in real time might be the next big shift Britain needs to make our grid greener for good.
What is the Matched Clean Power Index?
The Matched Clean Power Index is an annual, independent ranking that uses publicly available market data to compare how energy suppliers really perform on renewable electricity. Rather than looking at annual totals, it measures how closely each supplier’s renewable generation is matched, to what their customers are actually using, in real time.
This year’s scores range from a lofty 87% right down to just 0%. That’s a huge spread for suppliers who might all be using the word “renewable” or “green” on their website. The Index exists precisely to close that gap between marketing language and measurable reality, giving households a clearer, fairer way to compare tariffs.
“The Matched Clean Power Index helps expose the difference between marketing claims and real-world impact, tackling greenwashing, building trust and rewarding suppliers that genuinely support a cleaner, more resilient energy system.” Fran Woodward, MD for Supply.
How does Good Energy compare to other energy suppliers?
We’re proud to say Good Energy has topped the tables for the second year running, with a score of 87%, almost 20 percentage points ahead of the next best domestic supplier. That’s not a coincidence. We buy our electricity directly from a network of over 3,300 independent renewable generators across Britain, spanning wind, biogeneration, solar and hydro, and we actively work to match customer demand with that renewable supply throughout the year, rather than leaning on annual certificates.
We match the rest of our power over the course of the year — figures we’re transparent about publishing, because half-hourly matching is a genuinely difficult thing for any supplier to achieve consistently.
Why is real-time energy matching important?
Electricity can’t be stored at scale — it has to be used more or less as soon as it’s produced. That’s the whole reason hourly matching matters: it shows whether clean power is genuinely flowing into the system at the exact moment demand rises, whether that’s a washing machine switching on at home or a factory floor firing up in the morning.
Right now, around 50% of UK electricity comes from renewable sources. Raising that figure means investing in more capacity, spread geographically and across different technologies – wind, solar, hydro and biogeneration – since each comes online under different weather conditions.
It also means using power smarter, shifting things like EV charging or heavy machinery to off-peak hours so less pressure falls on the grid when it’s already stretched. With AI and rising air conditioning use pushing demand up further, that shift is only becoming more urgent.
For businesses, there’s an added incentive: emissions reporting is becoming stricter with Scope 2 reporting already mandatory for larger companies. Time-matched power gives clear, credible data to help businesses demonstrate real progress towards net zero.
Not all renewable tariffs are created equally, and now there’s independent data to prove it. The Matched Clean Power Index is a step towards genuine transparency in a market that’s long needed it — helping you see past the marketing and understand exactly what you’re paying for.
We’ve always believed that consumers deserve to know where their electricity really comes from. Topping the Index for the second year running is proof that sourcing renewable power directly from independent British generators, and matching it to real demand, actually works. That’s the future we’re building towards, one hour at a time.
FAQs about real-time energy matching
Most energy suppliers rely on Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGOs) — certificates that prove a certain amount of renewable electricity was generated somewhere on the grid over the course of a year. The catch is that REGOs can be bought and sold entirely separately from the power itself, so a supplier can buy up cheap certificates (solar in summer, wind in winter) without ever purchasing the matching renewable electricity for their customers. It’s a legal accounting practice, but it means a “100% renewable” tariff can still be largely powered by fossil fuels behind the scenes.
A few independent badges are worth checking for: B Corp certification (Good Energy is the only UK home energy supplier to hold it), Which? Eco Provider status, and Uswitch’s Green Accreditation. Beyond formal accreditations, it’s worth looking at real customer reviews (Trustpilot, for example) and your supplier’s score on the Matched Clean Power Index itself, since it’s one of the few measures based on actual delivery rather than marketing claims.
Matched use publicly available market data to compare suppliers on a like-for-like basis — measuring how closely each supplier matches renewable generation to customer demand on a half-hourly basis, rather than relying on the suppliers’ own claims or annual certificate totals. Because every supplier is assessed against the same data and the same methodology, it gives a more independent, consistent picture than marketing alone.
