Six months of behind the scenes work came to fruition two weekends ago when our gas systems (for customer registration and billing and so on) went live.
Our first ‘Green Gas’ customers are with us now. Me included I’m pleased to say.
While we shake things down we’re limiting the sign up rate to a few hundred a week. If you want to get in the queue to be among the first you can do that here.
The response from Ecotricity customers and non customers, to this idea, has been fantastic.
The response from British Gas has been something else. Odd to say the least.
Just before Xmas we had a series of legal threats from them, about one a week for three weeks in fact.
The first alleged that we were ‘pretending’ to be British Gas. They didn’t like our tongue in cheek “Real British Gas” logo it seems – we’ve tweaked it a bit here to make them feel better. It’s hard to take that seriously – we are so not pretending to be British Gas. Why on earth would we? It was a joke guys.
About a week later we got another legal threat, this time dear old BG claimed we were misleading people by offering Green Gas, when in fact it wasn’t (green). Something we think we’ve been pretty clear about.
As part of this they complained our web site offered ‘free gas’. Well I don’t know what gas they might have been breathing down there in BG’s legal bunker, but there’s no such thing on our web site. Anyway, they threatened to refer us to Trading Standards, that would have been funny – we ignored them, nothing happened.
Then, talk about buses, about a week later we get another legal threat from BG. This time they’re upset because we’re about to publish 2009’s WhichGreen statistics – the ones that show how much each electricity company in the UK spent, in 2009 – building new renewables.
BG didn’t like the number we had for them, which is zero (funnily enough they have a green tariff called Zero – is this what it means… 
).
I won’t get into the details of that here as we’ll publish WhichGreen 2009 figures shortly.
So, it seems we’ve miffed BG by announcing our Green Gas plans, they’ve made that pretty clear to us. This string of legal threats doesn’t do them any credit IMO, but maybe that’s just how the Big Six roll.
Meanwhile on the real Green Gas front, we’re moving ahead with plans to build a pilot project. It’s actually fascinating stuff (or maybe I’m sad… ) – looking at volumes of waste required, where to get it, the technology, land requirement, planning issues and the number of homes we might be able to supply Green Gas to, from each ‘GasMill’.
Cheers.
Hi Dale,
All sounds like your really rocking the boat good and proper! Fantastic. Just out of curiousity are you able to pipe methane or biogas directly into the natural gas network? Or do you have to build a seperate network?
Hi Justin, the gas can be injected into the existing gas grid, that’s one of the most exciting aspects of this – it mirrors the situation with green electricity – no new grids needed just new sources.
Cheers.
It’s seems all so perfect. Let’s hope natural gas will be obselete some day soon. I think it would be facinating to open one of your gasmills to the public like your Ecotech centre. Maybe this makes me look like a little sad green geek. I don’t care.
I got cold called by British Gas last week to ask why I didn’t get electricity from them. I said I was with Ecotricity and he said that they had a green tariff and did I know that Ecotricity didn’t supply only renewable electricity. I explained that I did know that but you used the money to invest in more wind turbines. He sounded quite miffed!
Thanks Helen, sounds like you got one of the more decent cold callers – we hear all sorts of stories, some of these guys will say anything.
Cheers.
I dont know if British Gas have the word ‘Investment’ written anywhere within their whole company, do they?
Maybe in the folder named ‘BIG FAT SHAREHOLDERS ONLY’
Hi Dale,
I wonder if you might be watching companies like
Ceramic Fuel cells? link to Bluegen modules
Supplying your natural or biogas to homes that have one of these CHP fuel cell modules would enable the house to become a net exporter of electricity to the grid (Ecotricity’s bit of it?) while the point-of-use conversion of gas into electricity avoids electrical transmission losses and also enables the “waste” heat to be used for hot water .
Just a thought…
Nick Palmer
For the planet – and the people – because they’re worth it
Blogspot “Sustainability and stuff according to Nick Palmer”
Thanks for this NIck. I’ve not seen these Bluegen modules before.
I think CHP is a good idea and you’re right it saves transmission losses.
But in terms of fuel efficiency it’ll give typically 80% (including the hot water) whereas using gas directly to heat water will give (from a good condensing boiler) about 90% – making it a better use of fuel.
CHP beats large scale gas burning for electricity, even without taking losses into account – Combined Cycle Gas Turbines have fuel efficiency of about 60%
Cheers.
Hi Dale,
Your point about point of use direct gas heating of water being significantly more efficient than a CHP for heating water or the house is of course correct. I know you know your stuff!
The electricity needed for non heat functions in a house is mostly generated, wind power excluded, at between 30-40% efficiency. Most of that heat gets wasted. Gas run CHP saves most of that heat.
I was trying to suggest that having hundreds (start small, get bigger later!) of distributed electrical generators, feeding their excess juice into the grid and running on your AD gas might be a new business model that would fit in nicely with Ecotricity’s method of expanding the renewable installed infrastructure. Having distributed hyper-local systems fits in better with sustainability concerns…
Nick Palmer
For the planet – and the people – because they’re worth it
Blogspot “Sustainability and stuff according to Nick Palmer”
Hi Nick, I get what you’re saying for sure, and I don’t disagree….:)
Such a thing would be a significant improvement in efficiency terms over the current method of electricity production (and distribution). The current (typical) method is heinously wasteful.
Cheers.
I’m considering your invitation to be one of the first people to sign up to your Green Gas and have been looking at the discussions here.
One thing that worries me a bit is the suggestion that some of the input would be waste food. Surely we should trying to reduce the waste of food rather than creating a market for it. With all the embedded carbon in growing, fertilising, transporting, processing food, it’s hardly a zerocarbon source. I’m in the middle of reading Tristam Stuart’s book at the moment which is what put it in mind.
http://www.tristramstuart.co.uk/
My other query is about the pricing model of having a higher price for the first units and then a lower one for the rest as it does not encourage lowering energy use. A friend uses Equigas who don’t do this, and like some companies they don’t subsitute this for a standing charge, and their charges are much lower than British Gas.
Hi Susan, understand your concern.
But we’re def not intending to create a market for food waste.
The thing is food waste exists and creates disposal problems, currently it goes to landfill, in the future that will probably be banned and plenty of waste operators would like to incinerate it – along with other waste.
Using food waste to make gas is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
The other thing that might be useful to know is that in order to use food waste to make gas it has to be collected separately – it has to be segregated.
We’ve been discussing this with one Council and they tell us that in a pilot scheme they ran (of segregated food waste collection) – volumes of food collected fell by about 15% over time. Their belief was that when people could see the food they were wasting, they wasted less. That might be a very good upside.
The other thing they tell me is that if they collected food on a permanent basis (as opposed the trial) they would expect to reverse the current cycles whereby recyclables are collected every two weeks and general waste every week – so that recyclables including food would be a weekly collection and the residual bit (for landfill) every two weeks – presumably because the residual waste would become the minority. I quite liked the thought of that.
I hear what you say on unit pricing and Equigas. All I can say on that front is we’ve chosen to price match British Gas because most people are with them. And of course we use our bill monies to build new sources of green energy – we can’t be the cheapest supplier and do that at the rate we currently do. We aim to give a fair price with the greenest possible outcome.
Cheers.
Hi Dale,
Caerphilly council in Wales has weekly collections of food waste. I’m not entirely sure what they do with it. Perhaps they could be one of your sources?
Jonathan.
Hi Dale,
Bristol City Council also has weekly recycling and food waste collections and only biweekly for “normal” rubbish….its very encouraging and since they started this system we onl y have about one binbag a week of non-recyclable stuff!
Perhaps Bristol could potentially be one of your food waste sources too? They are quite set on becoming the greenest city in Europe – well, if they stop this WB40 palm oil power plant going ahead that is – so they may be open to suggestions like this.
I am very excited to hear about the new gas provision…do you have any idea of the kind of time span we are looking at before you will be able to offer a joint gas-electricity tariff?
Cheers
Jenny
Just came across this news about BG being the first to pump bio-methane into the grid:
http://www.newenergyfocus.com/do/ecco/view_item?listid=1&listcatid=32&listitemid=3519§ion=Bioenergy%20%26%20Waste
Looks like they have similar ideas about offering a ‘green’ tariff?
Britain’s national energy strategy is dysfunctional…. even Ofgem has finally figured that one out….
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/7153724/How-long-before-the-lights-go-out.html
LNG is going to be a high risk strategy game….
And the 62m UK peeps, their children and grand-children deserve better than that….
But heck, we’d rather have ex PM’s working for JPMorgan, The Carlyle Group et al…
Meanwhile we play puppy-dawg to the American’s in other ways too…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvQD83WRCg&
Yep coprotocracy rules…. so stand up people…. defy it…. put yer hard-earned duckets the way of folk and company’s that have a longer-term view….
Like Dale and Ecotricity….
Hello Alexandra,
We can make coprotocracy work for us. If Dale allows farmyard manure to be used in the green gas project, the poo will give us the power.
Best regards,
Jonny
P.S. Dale, please can you answer my question of 9th December – repeated below – under “Green Gas is here” about use of farm slurry?
From a moral perspective is it so different from selling electricity originating from coal or nuclear in the brown portion of Ecotricity’s fuel mix?
Jonny,
I suppose you are referring to the fact that most cattle slurry comes off farms that are energy intensive and/or use concentrated feed, no doubt originally grown with the use of lots of fossil fuel derived fertilisers etc.
Whatever the source of the slurry, power from it would displace fossil or nuclear fuelled generation. This is good if the slurry would have otherwise been disposed of – even better if it would have been allowed to decompose “freely” because that would liberate lots of methane – a powerful global warming gas.
If the slurry came from an organic farm, then the “embodied energy” in the slurry should be somewhat less. In the future, as more energy is supplied from green sources, the embodied fossil fuelled energy proportion of slurry (and digestible waste generally) will reduce. We are not very far on the way there yet but patience will bring it about.
Sometimes objections are raised to green initiatives because it’s simply not possible for them to be perfectly “sustainable” right from the start. While society is still run on unsustainable lines, and all the methodologies and business practices that have evolved to fit that scenario still remain predominant, there will often be contradictions when introducing green ideas.
For example, try setting up a recycling scheme and some joker with a calculator will attempt to work out that the energy you save recycling XYZ is marginal and they claim you might as well incinerate it.
Such calculations often ignore lots of other factors such as habitat and scarce resource depletion etc but mostly the fact that once people start to recycle they almost automatically start living a less wasteful life – they make different purchasing decisions etc.
These factors never appear in the simplistic LCA’s (Life Cycle Analyses) that our joker with a calculator does and yet they are a vital part of peoples’ learning how to live “sustainably.”
I forgot to say that on an organic farm, of course, most if not all of the slurry etc is used directly as organic fertiliser and so there is nowhere near as much”waste” to be treated.
The digestate (what remains) from an AD plant, of course can still be used a fertiliser/soil improver but that from a conventional farm may not (AFAIR) be applied to food crops because it contains various hormones/antibiotics etc from the intensive methods used these days. That certainly applies to human manure…
Modern farms are energy intensive so I think a good move for them would be to have their own in-house AD plants to generate their own heat and power thus leaving little spare slurry for Ecotricity type operations.
Hi Jonny, sorry if I missed your question.
I see Nick’s response on this below and I’m guessing that he may be right, in terms of where you’re coming from on this one – it being an embodied energy/carbon thing. That’s not my biggest issue though.
My problem with farm waste is a moral one. I believe that it is only intensive farms (factory farms) that produce an excess of animal waste – and that organic farms do not.
I’m against all factory farming for moral reasons, I think it’s a crime against nature actually. So it’s for that reason that there’s a big question mark over the use of farm waste.
I say question mark because it’s something that requires further research/investigation to be sure and there may of course be exceptions out there. But if what I’m currently told holds true, then we wouldn’t use farm waste to make our green gas.
Cheers.
Hello Dale,
Not exactly – my real point is more about the polluting properties of methane emanating from the slurry and your fortunate position of being able to mitigate the harmful effects on the environment and climate. The embodied energy content of slurry, though evidently important from a power generation point of view, is secondary to my main concern.
I fully understand your moral reticence about having anything at all to do with industrial agribusiness. However I think there is this other moral issue to be considered. If any person is in a position to do so, should they not act to alleviate the problem?
Does the one moral imperative trump the other?
Best regards,
Jonny.
Hi Jonny, interesting question and dilemma.
From a methane point of view I understand that 95% (or so) of the methane emissions of slurry occur during storage on farms, as opposed to spreading on the land – when it’s out in the air it doesn’t make methane it’s only when air is excluded that that happens. I thought that was interesting to know.
Could we and if so should we utilise farm slurry is how I see your question.
First ‘could we’ – It takes a great deal of waste to feed an AD plant big enough to make enough gas to be worth scrubbing up and grid injecting. For example the scheme we’re working up for Stroud would take all the food waste in the whole of Gloucestershire and more.
The amount of slurry on a farm, even a large farm is not going to be sufficient I think, for an AD plant with gas injection (as a rule). Add to that the fact that many or most farms are quite remote from the gas grid. It looks unlikely.
Farms can harness their BS and other stuff and (mini) AD it for use of the gas on the farm though – that’s a neat and pretty economic way to go.
Coming to the ’should we’ – I get what you’re saying, maybe we have the opportunity at ecotricity to tackle a problem, even though we oppose the roots of the problem should we not intervene? I think not. The problem is agri farming, it’s an offence against nature even before you factor in climate change – it’s bad practice and it has to stop. it will stop in time of that I’m sure.
Even if we could use slurry for our green gas (which doesn’t look so likely) – we wouldn’t. Farming could and should clean it’s own act up – first thing would be to stop storing the stuff anaerobically – that might be an easy enough step to take and would deal with the methane problem, without vegan intervention……:).
Cheers.
An illustration to Dale’s point about better farming practise:
“If you suspend a cow in the air with buckets of grain, then it’s a bad guy,” Harttung explains. “But if you put it where it belongs — on grass — that cow becomes not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative.”
Read more: http://bit.ly/bQKPso
We took our eye of the long term picture too.
Britain faces ‘oil crunch’ within five years, Richard Branson warns
The North Sea is producing half as much oil as it was 10 years ago, that’s the real issue that gets totally avoided in the political debates about energy!
1999 ~3 Million barrels per day
2008 ~1.6 Million barrels per day
What’s just as worrying is that as a nation we are hell bent on extracting oil and gas from the Falkland Isles!
Everyone gets exited at the fact that we could pay off national debt and forgets that it would completely undo any good we may have done to reduce CO2 levels.
I find the rush for greed and short sightedness of the whole thing overwhelming and disturbing. When will we ever learn that short term fixes never help you in the long run?
The hippocracy that we’ll tackle climate change yet we’ll forage for fossil fuels is incredible. I guess it’s like crack coccaine, hard to give up!
Hope Dale will help the addicts before they take a turn for the worst.
I’m sure this won’t be the first time one of the Big 6 come running at you Dale. Tell them all to go to hell and carry on doing what you’re doing. They will never get the level of customer loyalty that you’re able to encourage through Ecotricity’s policy of reinvestment.
British Gas are such a bunch of cowboys in my opinion. Every so often they’ll launch ‘crazy biggest ever price cuts’. Then once they’ve hooked half the nation through media might alone, they hike up the bills and milk you dry.
On the Ecotricity site the claim is made that “the waste from six cows will power and heat a house for a year”. If that is over the lifetime of the cows it is misleading. If it is six cows in a year then the “for a year” is redundant – the same will apply over the following year etc.
Hiya Paul,
We put this to our facts and figures bod, and he says:
“Hands in the air Paul, you’ve spotted our deliberate mistake.
Basically, the slurry produced over a year by six cows is enough to generate sufficient biogas to meet the heat needs of an average household, around 20,500kWh. We arrived at this figure using an assortment of Defra cow slurry facts and biogas generation figures. Somewhere along the way this morphed into the same 6 cows now producing enough gas to not only heat the house but also to generate the electricity to light it.
This was one of a number of stats that we came up with in the early days of this project to help illustrate the benefits of biogas. As we don’t support the idea of biogas generation from commercial cow slurry this fact really is a bit redundant, interesting but redundant, so we’ve gone back and removed it from the site to avoid any further confusion.
Thanks for pointing it out to us.”
Hope that clarifies things? Thanks again for your comment..
Paul