Carbon-free energy: how to avoid greenwash
Since Good Energy launched time-based carbon-free energy (CFE) for our business customers a year ago the new approach to certification of renewables has gathered momentum.
Big tech was already on board with carbon-free energy reporting, as was the UN, so it could be said that the UK has been playing catch up. Nevertheless, in the last year we have seen several other suppliers and service providers launch time-based carbon-free energy products into the market.
This is very welcome. Together with influential cross industry organisations like the Climate Group and UKGBC throwing their weight behind time-based certification, the momentum is now very much with what we believe to be the key to unleashing a flexible fully renewable energy system and solving greenwash in energy supply. The sooner we move away from the outdated unit based REGO system, under which you can use a certificate from summer solar power to green-up winter gas generation, the better.
But with change comes opportunity, and as expected it seems some suppliers have used this opportunity to greenwash.
Carbon-free energy can’t involve green-shuffling
Good Energy has only ever offered 100% renewable electricity tariffs to our business and domestic customers. The reason for this is more than our steadfast commitment to renewables — it is the only way we can uphold our green promise to customers.
If, as many others suppliers do and have done, we offered a non-green electricity tariff to a customer group, there would be no way of knowing how we are apportioning the renewable power we procure from generators.
If a supplier has green and non-green tariffs, then when customers sign up for green supply they can simply fudge the numbers, to apportion more renewable power to some customers and less to others. This is what we call the ‘greenshuffle’.
Fine, you might say. The customers who care about renewable power are getting it, those who don’t, aren’t. The problem is that this breaks the promise of a renewable tariff — that it will help grow renewables. When you switch to a supplier which offers anything other than green supply, your choice is unlikely to be making a difference.
How carbon-free energy incentivises the right fuel mix
The fundamental purpose of time-based carbon-free energy is that it closely matches how customers actually use energy. A time-based system helps incentivise not only the growth of renewables, but the growth of the specific mix of renewable technologies whose output most closely matches demand on the electricity grid.
Good Energy does time-based energy matching at a full portfolio level. We provide our half hourly business customers with the Granular portal to see how their usage is being matched on an hourly basis. But in fact we successfully match all of our supply customers’ demand, business and domestic, with our renewable generators, on a half hourly basis over 90% of the time.
We have only been able to do this by being selective about the generators we procure from, meaning we find the right mix to match our customer demand profile as closely as possible. And as we source our renewable power via Power Purchase Agreements, half of which are new connections and many otherwise unsubsidised, we know we are helping to incentivise not only new renewable capacity onto the grid, but a mix of new renewables which match how customers actually use energy.
We can offer 100% carbon-free energy… but we won’t
Products like Octopus Energy’s ‘Electric Match’ invite interested business customers to select three generators to match to their electricity use. We could do something similar, and achieve a higher matching score than Octopus’ promised 70%. If a business customer were to come to us looking for 100% carbon free energy, it would be very easy for us to select two or three of our generators which match their demand profile to give them what they want.
But we won’t. Because that would fundamentally undermine the entire point of time-based energy matching. No longer would it be incentivising an energy system with the renewable technologies to match how customers are using energy. Cherry picking renewable generators to match an individual’s energy usage would be ‘greenshuffling’. More smoke and mirrors.
Of course the best way time-based certification could be implemented to incentivise a flexible, fully renewable energy system is at grid level. But that has not happened yet.
So in the meantime Good Energy will not do anything less than energy matching at portfolio level — all of our customers, all of our generators, output and demand matched in granular time intervals.