Choosing Your: Electricity
Take away electricity from modern life and you pretty soon return to a camping-like existence. I well remember regular powercuts during the 70’s, making beans on toast by the fire.
Now we use more electricity than ever, but often it’s only when the bill arrives that we realise we’re chewing through it at a record rate.
What's the problem ?
Electricity production in the UK results in massive CO2 emissions as it’s mostly from burning coal and gas. The problem is made worse as the efficiency of electricity production from fossil fuels is pretty low. Most electricity is made by burning fuel to turn water into steam. This steam then drives a generator, but a lot of the fuel’s energy is turned into heat, which in the UK is mostly wasted up those great big cooling towers. (Other countries make good use of it to heat homes - it's called Combined Heat and Power).
The result is that the electricity consumed in the average house can produce as much CO2 as running a car for about 10,000 miles a year. Some places are substantially more. Whatever way you look at it, it’s an awful lot of emissions going up - each and every year!
Different flavours:
However all electricity is not equal. Since the UK electricity system was de-nationalised the number of different suppliers has kept on growing. The aim of competition was originally to keep the price down, but today we have got different companies starting to sell different “flavours” of electricity.
This is great news if you want choose how much pollution you make as a number of companies have sprung up offering “green” or “greener” electricity. The greeness is measured in amount of Carbon Dioxide emitted per kWh of power generated, and the main suppliers are summarised on the chart below.
The coloured bars show how much each other producer emits in terms of grams of CO2 per kWh. These officially reported figures are from 2007 for total generation and will change a bit each year as producers use different fuel mixes.
Top of the pack is Good Energy which prides itself on producing only from renewables, with Green Energy close on its heels.
>> Click here for the UK's Greenest supplier
Some less than green suppliers offer “greener tariffs”, but it is well worth checking the small print on these. For instance, check that this is a permanent greening of your supply – not just for “3months” then back to normal as one had in very small print !
Another critical question is just how green is “greener”. If you are a supplier in the Black band, moving up to the Brown band will be greener, but it is still very high on Carbon emissions.
If you want to permanently reduce your emissions from electricity, it is arguably best to switch to one of the suppliers that specialise in low Carbon power as their reputation depends on their greenness.
Switching to zero Carbon electricity will at a stroke cut your domestic emissions by a huge amount. In fact it is the single biggest change you can make to your electrical Carbon footprint. The sooner a house is on zero Carbon electricity the sooner its savings start clocking up.
HOWEVER, and it’s a big however, please, please make sure that you have reduced your electrical consumption as much as possible first. It might be tempting to think I’ll switch supplier and then all my worries are covered, but this is not so.
Thing is renewable power is in very limited supply, and to use it to power things on standby, inefficient bulbs, things left on needlessly etc is arguably an immoral waste of it.
Rather than powering one wasteful house on it, much better to reduce use and then get two houses on that same amount of zero Carbon electricity.
So, as ever, 1st: Reduce Use, 2nd: Be more Efficient, 3rd: Be Greener. In that order.
