How green is your electricity? Introducing Good Green Supply
‘100% renewable’ electricity tariffs are rarely as green as they seem. We’re introducing a new set of standards challenging suppliers to be more transparent.
Most people don’t know how electricity suppliers can claim to be ‘100% renewable’, but if they did, they’d be shocked.
Your energy supplier can buy most of the power it supplies to you from fossil fuels and sell it to you as green.
Due to a convoluted system involving certificates known as ‘Renewable Guarantees of Origin’ or REGOs, brokers and third party markets, renewable claims are deceptive.
Customers are left not knowing what they are buying. And there is little evidence that the significant amount of money spent on REGOs — estimated to be about as much as £1 billion or more annually — is helping to grow renewables. Meaning they are an additional expense on energy bills, lining the pockets of brokers, with no discernible benefit to making our energy any greener.
Good Energy wants more transparency. And so do consumers. Our research has found that 73% want stricter rules on energy suppliers making green claims, and 38% believe energy suppliers are more likely to greenwash than other types of business.
Independent assessments of energy suppliers’ green credentials exist, but are increasingly broadening in scope to include factors such as whether a supplier offers flexible ‘time-of-use’ tariffs or sells other green products like heat pumps and solar panels. These products are great, Good Energy offers them too, but they are irrelevant to how green a customer’s electricity is unless they are on such a tariff or buying such a product.
So we are launching Good Green Supply. Three scores that do indicate how green the electricity a supplier is providing to its customers is.
What are the Good Green Supply scores?
The following three metrics make up Good Green Supply:
True green
The percentage of power sourced directly from renewable generators. This could come from direct agreements with renewable generators or suppliers’ own wind or solar farms. The key is that the supplier is not buying power from fossil fuels while selling it as ‘renewable’ using clean energy certificates.
New green
The proportion of power from renewable generators which are new to the grid. This is important because new generators means the grid is getting greener, which is what a green tariff should be supporting. A third of consumers (34%) say they are prepared to pay more for an energy tariff that genuinely supports the growth of renewable energy.
Time-matched green
The amount of customers’ energy usage that is matched to renewable generation hour by hour. Currently, suppliers can match winter electricity use with certificates from midsummer solar power, for example, which is not only misleading it is unhelpful in creating an energy grid that generates clean power when it is needed. This metric will demonstrate the amount of renewable electricity actually generated when customers are using it.
What are Good Energy’s Good Green Supply scores?
Good Energy is disclosing its scores for the most recent Ofgem fuel mix disclosure period, which runs from April to April annually, on our fuel mix disclosure webpage.
Our scores are 100% true green, 40% new green and 90% time-matched green.
We are inviting other renewable electricity suppliers to publish their scores too. Because when choosing a greener supplier, you should know what you’re buying.
Are you an energy supplier with a question or interested in publishing your Good Green Supply scores? Get in touch here.
Q&A
What gives Good Energy the credibility to set the standards for renewable supply?
Good Energy invented the fully certified 100% renewable electricity tariff. If you look at the historical fuel mixes of domestic electricity suppliers, Good Energy was the first to be 100% renewable and we were involved in development of the certification scheme which was essentially the same then as it is today. There is no other energy supplier which has the level of expertise on this that we do. And we know that the certification system as it was then, when only a fraction of power came from renewables, is not fit for purpose today when lots of power comes from renewables. REGOs were never intended to be traded separately from the power they relate to, but this unintended loophole has allowed for unabated greenashing.
Good Energy has never deviated from the original function, which is to buy power and REGOs direct from renewable generators, supporting new renewable generators to get online. Meanwhile we have also led the industry in matching renewable output to demand.
Aren’t these scores created to make Good Energy look good?
Good Energy has long procured power according to these principles, because they are what matters for making green energy supply meaningful and transparent. So it is natural that they would be the principles we emphasise in our transparency standards.
My supplier says it’s too big to match all of the power it supplies with power directly sourced from renewables, is this true?
It may well be. Good Energy is a very small energy supplier compared to others in the market and we are aware that if we grew significantly in a short space of time it would be a challenge to maintain our truly green sourcing principles. It is hard work contracting with lots of renewable generators and matching the power they produce to customers’ usage, and it is likely we would need to find more large scale, long term agreements with renewable generators, in addition to the many smaller scale ones we hold today. But this is exactly why we think suppliers should publish their Good Green Supply scores — if you can only match a small proportion of the electricity your customers use with power from renewables, tell them exactly how much so they know what they’re getting.
What period of time do the scores relate to?
We intend Good Green Supply to run alongside fuel mix disclosure, the official period of time the energy regulator Ofgem requires all suppliers publish where their electricity comes from (albeit often using REGOs to greenwash all or portions of it). So the figures we have published relate to the most recent disclosure period, which is April 23-March 24, and we will publish our April 24- March 25 figures with our fuel mix disclosure later this year.
When are you expecting other suppliers to publish their scores?
We would love other suppliers to move quickly and publish their scores for April 23 – April 24 now, but we are mainly hoping to see publication alongside fuel mix disclosures before September this year.
How are you defining ‘new green’? How new does a renewable generator need to be to count?
We have defined ‘new green’ as power from any renewable generator which was a ‘new connection’ at the start of their contract within the April 23 – April 24 time period. This discounts any renewed contracts, so generators who have been signed up with us and then resigned don’t count.
We do not own our own wind and solar farms anymore, largely because we saw we were having more impact through our renewable contracts, but we acknowledge this is a way suppliers can help make the grid greener. We would accept any power from a renewable generator a supplier has built itself within three years of the relevant period counts as ‘new green’ volume.
Most new renewable generation is subsidised through everyone’s energy bills. Should the scores reflect non-subsidised new renewables?
Subsidies tend to go towards larger renewable generators – which are important, but we need lots of small generators too. We did consider including power from non-subsidised renewables as a score, and our data indicates that around 43% of our generators are unsubsidised to our knowledge. But unlike whether a generator is a new connection, we do not systematically ask generators which sign up with us whether they otherwise receive subsidies, meaning we could not be fully confident in publishing this score without this caveat. We will consider including it in future and would welcome other suppliers being transparent about this too.
My supplier is a big investor in renewables, does this mean it should score well?
It might do and clearly investing in renewables is a good thing. What matters on an individual customer level, however, is how much impact your energy use is having. A large supplier can be a big investor in renewables, with only a few pence of your energy bill contributing to that, or indeed your energy bill being entirely unrelated as the renewable investment is funded in other ways. Our scores are created to give customers better insight on how much impact they are having as an individual home or business.
Aren’t time-of-use tariffs and products like heat pumps and solar a good way to be greener?
Absolutely. Good Energy has time-of-use tariffs and we sell heat pumps and solar. But these are standalone products which are not relevant to how green customers’ energy is unless they themselves are using them.
You say you are inviting other renewable electricity suppliers to publish their scores. What about suppliers that have a mix of renewable and non-renewable tariffs?
The Good Green Supply scores are designed to avoid ‘cherry picking’ – they are at a supplier level, not a tariff level. This is because energy suppliers which offer a mix of green and non-green tariffs can just ‘shuffle’ their renewable power around. Say a customer joins their ‘green’ tariff, does the supplier then go and source more clean power for that customer? Or do they simply move some of the clean power from their ‘brown’ tariff customers to align with the ‘green’ tariff customer? Clearly they can do the latter, which is not transparent for customers and doesn’t help green the grid. So suppliers which offer a mix of tariffs are welcome to publish their Good Green Supply scores, but it must be for all the electricity they supply – not a cherry picked green or super green tariff.
