29 June 2019

Green tariffs and solar panels can make a real contribution to reducing our domestic carbon footprint

A number of energy providers (although disappointingly not that many of the Big 6) offer green electricity tariffs. These enable you to guarantee that every kWh of your electricity is backed up by a kWh of zero carbon electricity generated somewhere. The electricity supplier achieves this by acquiring a Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin (REGO) for each kWh it sells. The certification system for REGOs ensures that each kWh of zero carbon electricity can only be sold once in this way.

Some argue that green tariffs are a waste of time, because they just shuffle around the electricity that is already being generated rather than changing the overall composition. Because the proportion of people signed up to green tariffs is significantly lower than the proportion of low carbon energy in the UK mix, a marginal person signing up to a green tariff may not improve the UK’s energy mix. Moreover, not everyone can opt for a 100% green tariff today - there's not enough capacity currently available. Finally, renewable energy cannot yet supply the grid uninterrupted power and so green tariff customers inevitably piggy-back off carbon-based sources of fuel at certain times. On this view, having a green tariff is virtue signalling that has no value.

I thought about this a fair bit when choosing our green energy tariff provider. It's not the purpose of this blog to recommend individual providers - we use Ecotricity, but you'll need to do your own research. But I chose a company that not only has only pure green tariffs, but is also committed to investing to bring new renewable (and only renewable) capacity on-stream in the UK. This provider spends way more per customer than anyone else building green electricity capacity. They already generate around a third of their energy from their own growing portfolio of renewable electricity generators, and acquire the rest backed by REGOs. By using our energy costs to direct investment towards renewable resources, this seems to me to be sending a genuinely positive market signal.

In addition to our tariff choices, we have sought to make our energy greener through use of PV solar panels, which we installed several years ago. These generate around one-third of our electricity across the year (around 2,800kWh, a figure that was a pleasant surprise to me, and almost exactly in line with the advertised figure when we installed the panels). This currently saves about 1 Tonne of CO2 per annum.

Of course, the actual electricity we use (other than from our solar panels) is the same as anybody else's - it all comes from the same grid. Moreover, the renewable energy my provider is building is a drop in the ocean compared with the renewables investment of some of the bigger companies, and it is these bigger providers that will determine the pace of change, driven by Government energy policy. But companies respond to consumer demands, and it seemed to me important to send the strongest possible market signal, through our individual consumer choice, that we want to see the share of renewables grow as fast as possible. If everyone demands green tariffs, this will pull resources into faster transition in our electricity mix. Choosing a green tariff with any provider is good, but I do think some send stronger market signals than others.

The combination of our choice of electricity tariff and our solar panels enables me to say with clear conscience that our electricity is carbon-free, and I've assumed zero carbon from our electricity supply in calculating our footprint, saving about 3.5 Tonnes per annum. Of course, as this is built into our start-point footprint calculation, it doesn't go towards meeting our reduction goal. The further improvements need to be found from elsewhere.

Our choices as consumers send important economic signals and can help shape what the market supplies. Green tariffs are no different, and the right sort of tariff can validly be counted towards reducing our individual carbon footprint. 

This blog is part of a series sharing our learning and experiences as we adopt a Middle Class Approach to Decarbonisation