Green Electricity Suppliers

They’re all doing it, draping themselves in images of windmills and claiming green credentials – but how green are the UK’s electricity companies really?

How much of what you see is spin and how much is real? That’s a question we’ve asked ourselves often enough. And lately, with the ‘Big Six’ spending £millions on slick TV ads - this seems a more pressing question than ever. Is there a way to judge who's really green and who’s only saying they are? Actually it’s quite simple.

Just look at how much each electricity company spends building new sources of green electricity each year – New energy. The only green electricity that does anything to reduce CO2 emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels is the new green energy, the stuff that gets built today and tomorrow. If you’re not building you’re not actually achieving anything green at all. It’s just marketing and spin.

Ecotricity produced a measure for spending on New Energy called it ‘pounds per customer’ – it shows how much each electricity company actually spends, for each of it’s customers on the new green stuff. It’s a number that cuts through the fog of marketing and to the heart of the issue, irrespective of company size.

Some energy companies are bigger than others of course, so the total they spend on building new green electricity sources is useful to know, but is not the whole story. For example in 2004, npower spent £40m on new green energy, Ecotricity just £5m. But Ecotricity had just 5000 customers compared to npowers 5m customers.

To get meaningful comparisons you need to simply see how much is spent per customer. This shows you how much of your electricity bill actually gets spent each year, building new sources of green. And how much of a difference you make by being with your supplier. It's that simple - and called pounds per customer. It's the acid test of green commitment. It's simple enough maths too - Just take the total number of customers each supplier has and divide that by their total spend on new green electricity sources in any given year.

These are the figures for 2007. Prepare to be surprised.

Supplier	2007 spend per customer
Ecotricity	£555.36
Powergen	£17.28
Centrica	£7.12
npower	£3.89
EDF Energy	£3.55
Scottish Power	£2.63
Green Energy UK	£0.00
Good Energy	£0.00
Scottish & Southern Energy	£0.00

Ecotricity now offers two types of tariff, these are considered to be the greenest tariffs in the UK;

• New Energy
  
  All the Green energy in this tariff comes from Ecotricities own wind turbines, this year it’s just over 30% ­ and rising currently at almost 10% per year. The balance is ’Brown’ electricity bought in the market ­ and that reduces each year as the green increases. But the key part is this - for every £ customers spend through their electricity bills Ecotricity spend another £ building new sources of Green energy. And they price match each regional supplier so New Energy has no premium attached to it ­ - customers get ’Green for the price of Brown’.
  
  No wonder this is considered by people like the Soil Association, WWF and Oxfam to be the best green tariff in the UK, bar none.
  
  
• New Energy Plus
  
  For those that understand the need to build new sources to actually impact climate change ­ but who want a 100% tariff in the mean time. It’s New Energy (30% Green from Ecotricity turbines this year and rising fast), topped up with green electricity from existing renewable sources (instead of Brown) ­ making this a 100% Green tariff. You get the same total commitment to build, spend one £ on renewables for every one £ customers spend, ­ but it’s 100% green now. It’s a mixture of Old and New green energy in fact (New Energy Plus Old). It isn’t any better than New Energy, but some people just want 100%, so they offer it.
  
  The existing (Old) green energy they top up with is a scarce resource though, so there’s a small premium of 0.5p per unit, which works out at about £20 a year for a typical household - over and above the price of Brown electricity from each regional supplier.

For more information on Energy Suppliers by CO2 emissions and their "energy make up" visit our CO2/kWh table. The Ecologist magazine published an article on this same topic in June 2005 (pdf).


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