We had three principle aims:

• To give our customers the chance to share in the financial benefits of our work and the green energy revolution generally, without having to put things on their roof tops (which doesn’t work for everyone).
• To cut out the middlemen bankers who generally charge much more to borrowers than they pay to savers.
• And to raise new sources of finance to speed up the rate at which we can build new sources of green energy. Bridging our ‘funding gap’.

And when we launched it this time last year we were both excited and a little anxious, as to how it might be received.

We needn’t have been. It was a smash hit, raising £10 million with ease.

Earlier this year, No 10 invited Ecotricity to a conference to present the ecobond concept to the UK Nordic Baltic Summit, which was attended by Prime Ministers (nine no less!), including David Cameron.

And with the money raised we set about building a windmill to power a solar panel factory (nice one that), the UK’s first major Sun Park later in the summer – and a third windmill to power Ford’s diesel engine factory at Dagenham.

We also carried on with our pipeline of projects – in planning.

And a few weeks ago we found ourselves holding planning permission for another 19 windmills – which needed funding.

So we launched ecobond two, last weekend.

All being well we’ll raise the £10 million that we’re seeking and that will enable us to increase our green energy capacity by almost 50%.

ecobonds are firmly a part of what we do now – each year as we accumulate more projects to build, we hope to be able to launch another ecobond. In doing so, we believe that more people will thus join our work and share the benefits – and together we’ll build more new green energy sources – and do it faster than Ecotricity could alone. People Power.

Cheers.

—————————–

Further information & details of how to apply for ecobond two here: http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/ecobond

These seem to be the big three.

Customer Service is perhaps the most overlooked of them all – it’s the one where customers have least data to compare – to actually identify a better service.

Switching for this reason will often be a reaction to bad service with their current provider and at the same time a leap in the dark – often out of the frying pan and into the fire.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Since October 2009 OFGEM has obliged all energy companies to record and report their annual customer complaints in a standardised way – making them easily comparable (potentially).

But most people won’t know this and won’t have seen any figures – because they get buried on individual supplier websites. They take some digging out, truth be told.

You’d think that OFGEM, having obliged all suppliers to record and report this data, would actually present it in one place – one easy to read table perhaps, so that it could be used to judge energy suppliers. What otherwise is the purpose of collecting it?

We thought so, we asked, but OFGEM said no. It’s a stance made all the harder to understand given the regulator’s recent focus on the need for people to switch supplier – as some kind of antidote to high energy bills, and Big Six market dominance.

An interesting statistic in this regard is that only 20% of people use price comparison sites when switching. Maybe price isn’t the big driver it’s often taken to be.

Last year, mystified (by OFGEM’s stance) but undeterred, we did the leg work, assembled the data and published it ourselves – we’re just updating it now as this year’s data comes in. It’s here at the foot of this page.

We’ve presented complaint data as a ratio per thousand customers, in order that the figures are properly comparable between all suppliers, irrespective of size. And that’s not just a requirement to be able to compare small independents with the Big Six – the Big guys themselves vary from 5 million customers to over 15 million. A ratio per thousand allows proper comparison between all suppliers. It’s impossible without it.

The results make interesting reading.

It’s not just a case of small is good and big is bad. Last years table had a small supplier at the top (ecotricity) and another one at the bottom (Ovo Energy). And within the Big Six, two of the smallest of them sat at both the top and bottom of the spread. Both have 5 million customers.

And Ecotricity topped the table, with complaint levels an order of magnitude lower than the next best company (which was EDF at the time).

This year we’ve reduced our complaint levels by another 20% and we top the table again – easily. We’re pretty chuffed with that of course.

As this was written – EDF were the only supplier that looked likely to meet the deadline this year – until this story broke in the media and they all rushed their figures out.

For EDF it was not good news, with a whopping 40% increase in complaints on last year. Something obviously has gone wrong. Useful to know if choosing a new supplier?

With most figures now out the other clear trend from last year is a reduction in complaints among the small guys (that publish) and an increase in the big guys. Interesting.

We think people do care about good customer service; they just need to know they have a choice. That requires a measure (which OFGEM has provided) and publication (which Ecotricity has).

————————-

This is an opinion piece by me that also appeared in Soapbox on Utility Week last Friday (not yet available online)

A bit of Perspective

One of the oft repeated complaints of the anti wind, anti climate change brigade is that green energy gets a lot of subsidies.

It’s a theme taken up recently by sections of the media – like the Daily Mail – claiming that green subsidies are responsible for high energy bills – and silly stuff like that.

But is it true…?

A few weeks ago a customer of ecotricity asked us just how much of his bill money was taken up by other support for green energy, other than that which ecotricity did itself – meaning through the Renewables Obligation (RO). It caused us to take a look at the cost of that per typical household. This is what we found:

The most recent published figures we could find were for the year ended April 2010.

Using data from OFGEM and assuming there are 26.7 million homes in Britain – we came to the figure of £13.84 per household per year to support renewable energy through the RO. Of this, £4.15 was for onshore wind.

Hardly princely sums. Especially if looked at in perspective;

For example – we also calculated the annual cost per household of the nuclear ‘clean up’ – the cost of containing nuclear waste – it’s a rather more significant £34.47 per year, per household.

And then we went looking for the support given to the fossil fuel industry and we found the annual cost per household is an incredible £1,000. That figure comes from the government itself – albeit when they were in opposition.

So we spend £13.84 per household (per year) on clean new sources of energy, nearly three times as much more to clean up the mess the nuclear industry has already made and a comparative small fortune to subsidise fossil fuels. The past and the present (in energy source terms) receive vastly more public support than our energy future.

That’s a perspective the Daily Mail won’t share with it’s readers.

There’s one more piece of perspective worth sharing – In the last twelve months energy bills in Britain have risen by roughly £200 per household (per year) – simply due to fluctuations on global energy markets (fossil fuel markets).

Fossil fuels didn’t suddenly become more expensive to extract or process – this is all about ‘free markets’ and commodity speculators.

That’s £200 we’re all spending on ‘Free Market’ price movements – £35 cleaning up nuclear waste and £1,000 subsidising fossil fuels….. oh and £14 supporting Green Energy.

That’s a perspective I thought worth sharing.

To me the current spending priorities are perverse – let spend that £1,000 year on Renewables – it’s a far better investment for all of us.

Cheers.

——————

Sources

RO data from Ofgem: Renewables Obligation Annual Report 2009-2010

Nuclear decommissioning Authority Budget 2009/10

Household Energy Bill Price Rises Dec 2010 = £1,150
Nov 2011 = £1345

£1000 fossil fuel subsidies – p.390

It’s a 1MW installation next door to our existing 16MW Wind Park – making it not just the first proper Sun Park in the UK but the first Hybrid Energy Park.

That’s something we’re pretty keen on, the combination of two intermittent, but complementary, forms of Renewable Energy – we think the likely outcome will be a smoothing effect. The sun and the wind tend to come at different times. Now that it’s up and running we get to test the theory and we’ll keep you posted.

There’s a nice news report here if you’re interested. Credit BBC…

Our press release is here.

We had big hopes, not just for big solar projects, but also for Hybrid schemes like this. And within the boundaries of each Sun Park we planned to create a nature reserve, a habitat for insects, birds and bees.

So last week, with its perfect weather for the opening of a Hybrid energy park (lots of sun and wind), was a bit of a bitter sweet event – great to see this first Sun Park up and ‘running’ (they don’t actually move, which though obvious, once you’ve been staring at them for an hour or two, does kind of impact) – and great to see the evidence already of nature taking back this small piece of farmland (five acres). But of course this will be our last Sun Park due to the governments crazy emergency U-turn on feed in tariffs the other week.

I just wanted to flag up here the extent to which killing off Big Solar really is a false economy, and not just something at odds with a serious green agenda – a point we’ve tried making to the government.

The government’s big issue with Big Solar appears to be its apparent success, the sheer amount of it that might get built – and the cost.

They’ve capped the amount that can be spent, under Feed in Tariffs, at £360M per year (come 2014), making this the only FIT scheme in the world with a cap in the process.

And it’s this cap that then caused their big problem (they say) – the possibility that Big Solar could be successful at the expense of other technologies, funding wise – because funding is suddenly limited. OK that’s the background.

The £360M a year equates to roughly £5 per household per year – not a fortune – roughly 1% of a typical electricity bill.

In contrast – Each time the cost of oil doubles, as it has in the last few years and will do again (and again), electricity bills rise by something like 30% – or £150 a year. Money that goes to energy market traders and speculators.

Far better we think to spend those kinds of sums on indigenous energy sources. We told the government so in our response to the FiT U-turn.

And then, just last week, we had a graphic demonstration.

British Gas announced a price rise of 16% for electricity and 18% for gas – adding £192 a year to a typical dual fuel energy bill with BG – and causing considerable consternation to the government, bless them.

Chris Huhne, the minister who’s department has just felled Big Solar because £5 a year is quite enough to spend on renewables thank you very much – had this to say:

“This announcement will be tough for consumers who are already struggling to meet their bills. The uncomfortable truth is Britain’s consumers are being buffeted by the violent and unpredictable winds of global fossil fuel prices.

“I refuse to stand by and watch this happen.

“I’m pushing the big six suppliers to help their customers overhaul their draughty homes and understand the best tariffs on offer, and I’m backing new entrants to bring more competition to the market.

“But there’s a way out of this. Look at how the French benefit from only relying on fossil fuels for a fraction of their power – bills there are only expected to rise by 3% this year.

“The UK electricity market has to change, so that we escape the cycle of fossil fuel addiction. Alternatives like renewables and nuclear power must be allowed to become the dominant component of our energy mix.

“Only radical reform now will give us the best chance in the long run of keeping the lights on at a price that doesn’t wreck our economy over and over again.”

These are fine words. But they don’t seem to match the deeds. Lots of rhetoric about radical reform of the energy market, when we can’t even have a proper Feed in Tariff. It’s a proper Renewable Energy program we need. Not righteous indignation when the inevitable happens. And keeps happening.

And this is not an isolated price rise – The Guardian reports that British Gas customers have seen their fuel bills rise twice in the last few months – by a total of £258 a year – an almost 25% increase….!

By the time we get to 2014 and the Feed in tariff costs this horrific £5 per household – fossil fuel energy bills could well have risen by £1,000 a year (at this rate), or at least if you’re with British Gas….

That’s £1,000 every year, not just a one off.

It kind of takes our point and makes it rather emphatically.

And it’s not just British Gas, Scottish power energy bills went up 21% (or £239) just last month.

Scrimping on the cost of renewables now, killing big solar because a fiver per house is already too much to bear – is a false economy – one that we will pay for many times over in years to come. We’ll spend far larger sums simply keeping pace with energy market speculators and traders – and that money is wasted, truly, compared to using it to build energy sources of our own.

That’s it, all I wanted to say…..

Cheers.

P.S. The panels for this project are Sharp NU range – made in Wrexham, UK.

We’ve just submitted our response to the government’s ‘emergency FIT consultation‘ – the one that aims to kill off big solar for reasons as yet unfathomed.

I thought we’d publish it here in the interests of debate and in case it’s interesting or useful to anyone.

Cheers.

Ecotricity is a green energy company, we were in fact the first company in the world to offer green electricity. We were founded, as the UK energy market de regulated, in 1996 and are the largest and oldest (and most successful) independent energy company in the UK. We supply around 50,000 customers, homes and business, large and small. Ecotricity shares the Government’s vision of a Green Britain – green energy and green jobs – and is a market leader in Green innovation. Currently around 50% of the electricity Ecotricity supplies comes from renewable sources that it built itself. It is a ‘not-for-dividend’ company and reinvests its profits into new renewable energy projects each year (£50million in wind over the past 7 years). Indeed Ecotricity has invested more per capita in new renewables build, over the last seven years, than any other energy company in the UK.

While it is essential that the Government provides a stable and predictable policy and regulatory environment, the task of greening UK energy should not purely be a government led initiative. As energy suppliers we have a key role to play in working with Government to empower individuals and communities to consume energy in a greener and more efficient manner.

Ecotricity has built 52 wind turbines throughout the UK and will open the UK’s first solar park this summer. The company had plans to build enough solar parks to achieve a 50/50 wind and sun renewable energy mix in as little as two years time, but the proposed change in FiTs would make these plans financially unviable.

Ecotricity introduced the UK’s first Green Gas tariff last year and now supplies its green gas to some 9,000 customers. The income from these green gas bills is being used to build Britain’s first dedicated ‘gas to grid’ plant. Currently 1.4 per cent of our gas supply is green from a sugar beet factory in Holland. This may sound relatively small but still much more than any other company and next year Ecotricity expects to double the amount of green gas it supplies.

Would you like this response to remain confidential? Yes/No (Delete as appropriate)

If yes, please state your reasons: No

CHAPTER 1: FAST-TRACK CONSIDERATION OF SOLAR PV GREATER THAN 50 KW

Executive Summary

1. The UK should have a large scale solar industry, whether this is supported by the current FiT scheme or by another mechanism, such as the RO. Many countries in Europe have successful large scale solar industries and the economic benefits that flow from that – all underpinned by robust FiT mechanisms. It’s not just about green jobs and green industry, we need large scale solar as part of the UK’s energy mix, to make the UK more energy independent and as part of our carbon reduction program.

2. If the current FiT structure cannot be maintained in respect of large solar, we suggest that rather than ‘remove’ large solar altogether (which the proposed 8.5p tariff price will do), the government considers restricting its size, so that some large scale projects can still go forwards. Such restrictions could be to reduce the 5MW limit for example – perhaps to 2MW. At least this way the UK would still have some form of large scale solar activity and the benefits that will accrue from that. If part of the government’s concerns are over land use competition with food, it would also be possible to restrict the grade of land that large scale solar projects would be supported on. The UK has sufficient land, suitable for solar but not for food crops, to power the whole country from this source of energy. Such a restriction on land use has already been introduced into the German FiT scheme.

3. If proposed FiT changes are to be undertaken, it is important that proper transitional arrangements are made to reflect the time and money invested in good faith by the industry – in response to the publication of the FiTs last year. This will prevent unnecessary damage to the industry and to government energy policy objectives and its reputation.

• We suggest that, if the proposed change to the tariff is to go ahead, it should not be brought forward to the 1st of August. It should be possible to maintain April 2012 as the cut off date. This would avoid an unseemly rush to change the rules, provide some consistency for the industry and the opportunity to deliver those early projects in the pipeline, while avoiding unnecessary pressure from the solar lobby. It should also improve the government’s standing in any legal action. We believe that there will not be so many large scale solar projects commissioned before April 2012 – so that the worst of the impact the government fears (on small solar) will not occur.

• We further suggest that if the government chooses the early cut off date, it sets the criteria for inclusion in the current tariff scheme to be those schemes in construction – as this is a process which takes six months. And if it chooses the later date (April 2012) it sets the criteria to be those schemes that are commissioned by that date. This will require schemes to be under construction by the end of this summer. It will limit uptake but provide a fair window for those with work in progress.

Q1: Do you agree or disagree that there is a need to limit access to FITs for large scale solar PV installations in order to meet spending review targets? Please give reasons for your answer. If you agree, what do you think is the best way of doing this?

Disagree

Comments:

1.1 While we understand the fiscal constraints placed on the Department by the Spending Review, limiting access to FiTs for large scale solar is unlikely to be of value in the long term. On the contrary, support for large scale solar PV installations is better value for money than micro installations and is more likely to deliver enough renewable energy to meet carbon reduction and climate change targets. As confirmed by Ofgem, support for large solar PV would not be to the detriment of any other renewable technology because there isn’t a limited pot of money under FiT legislation.

• The tariffs for large and small scale solar (within FiT legislation) clearly show (they mandate in fact) that large scale solar delivers three units of green electricity and three units of carbon are saved for every two produced by small scale solar – we get three for the price of two. Large scale solar is 50% more economical, a far better use of money.

Only large scale solar installations are able to generate enough electricity to make solar a serious player in the UK energy mix and provide the long term economic benefits which are evident in Germany where 133,000 people are employed in its solar sector and 17,000MW capacity is already installed in a 10 billion Euro a year industry.

1.2 The introduction of a fixed cap is inconsistent with a price-based mechanism and has not been introduced by any other country that has a FiTs scheme (and there are 50 worldwide). It fatally undermines the efficacy of the FiT scheme as it removes certainty for investors, large and small.

The proposed limit on FiT spending, which it is claimed will ‘save’ £40 million when compared to DECC’s original estimates of the cost of FiTs in 2014/15 – will only save each household in the UK about 50p per year. This figure is based on the fact that the cost of the FiT scheme is spread across all electricity consumption in the UK (domestic and business) and the split of consumption (and therefore costs borne) in the UK is roughly two thirds business and one third domestic. Therefore one third of the 40 million – say £13 million, is ‘saved’ by 24 million homes – making roughly 50p per home.

The costs of the FiT itself, capped at 360 million, is a small sum to spend on something as vital as renewable energy. Using the same approach as above, households will bear one third of this cost, £120 million – which is a bit less than £5 per household per year. This is 1% of a current typical electricity bill, it will be less than that by 2014/15 when the cap bites.

It is perhaps worth contrasting this 1% additional cost, or investment, in renewables – against the costs incurred from movements in global oil markets. When the price of oil doubles, as it has in the last few years, the impact this has on a typical electricity bill is a 30% increase. This far bigger sum is not used to invest in infrastructure, it is a price paid to the speculators of the global energy market. Oil prices will surely double again, it is only a matter of when. It is far better in our opinion to invest now in renewable energy sources, than simply waste money due to the inexorable rise of commodity prices.

It might also be considered that investment in renewables via FiT schemes, or any other method, is analogous to the use of Contracts for Difference – because the price of renewable energy is fixed within such schemes. In contrast to the price of conventional energy which will rise in the future. CfDs appear to be one of the government’s preferred measures to be brought within the proposed EMR. FiTs are a form of CfD. As well as a way of promoting renewable energy development and UK energy independence (and of course climate targets). They represent value for money and will do far more so in the future.

1.3 As the UK solar PV industry is in the nascent phase, tariffs must be retained at the current rate to ensure that there is continued confidence and security for investment in solar. A fast track reduction in tariffs ahead of April 2012 would undermine confidence in the FiTs scheme (and the government) as potential and existing participants cannot be sure that further changes won’t be made to FiTs and other renewable (and non renewable) energy schemes in the future.

1.4 Solar has huge potential as an energy source but if the Government believes that it is inappropriate for large scale solar to receive support through FiTs then it should seek to provide an alternative framework that allows big solar to succeed , through the ROCs scheme for example. Offshore wind already benefits from multiple ROC allocations, it would seem relatively straightforward to introduce a scheme of multiple ROCs for large solar. However the level of support will need to be similar to that of the FiT at this time.

1.5 It has been suggested that a reason for withdrawing support for large scale solar PV is that it runs the risk of arable land being used for ground based solar farms, making it harder for our country to feed itself. However, research undertaken by Ecotricity (the results of which are in the table below) shows that there is enough grade 4 land that could be used to deploy large solar PV installations which could potentially supply enough electricity to meet UK energy demand twice over without having to build on arable land.

Data source:

* Agricultural Land Classification (ALC) Statistics. Natural England 2011

Q2: Do you agree or disagree with the proposed new tariff bands and the accompanying proposed reduction of tariffs for PV installations in these bands? Please give reasons for your answer. If you disagree, please provide evidence to support an alternative.

Disagree

The ideal scenario is for retention of the tariff at the current rate so as to provide a real contribution from solar to our national energy mix and climate change targets as well as security to the industry and potential new investors in the energy sector.

Comments:

2.1 The reduction in tariff for solar PV installations between 250KW and 5MW to 8.5p per KW will effectively kill off investment in large scale solar PV. The Government’s aim of reducing project rates of return to just 5% is misguided, as this level is so low that no projects will proceed. Government should be aware that no renewable energy projects in the UK are built with such a low rate of return, and it is therefore entirely unrealistic to expect this will happen with solar PV. Because of our unique nature, Ecotricity builds projects in the UK at lower rates of return than probably any other developer – we are not in this for the money. If we cannot build projects at a 5% rate of return then we are certain that nobody else can or will.

We suggest that the government might find it instructive to ask DECC what rate of return offshore wind energy projects are expected to provide under the current RO system. We believe you will find they are rates of return in double figures, ie over 10%. A rate similar to that provided under the current FIT scheme for large scale solar.

2.2 The Government has referred to the success of FiTs for solar PV in other European countries, particularly Germany. It has also claimed that the proposed recution in FiT support to 8.5p a unit would merely bring the UK into line with countries such as Germany. This is untrue. As the table below demonstrates, none of Germany, France or Spain has reduced tariffs to 8.5p per KW for installations above 250KW despite all three having more mature markets than the UK. More mature markets of course lead to lower costs.

The table below shows that Germany provides over twice as much financial support to large scale solar PV compared to the proposed 8.5p – the government’s claim to be reducing to German levels is simply untenable. (adjustments for sunlight levels are made in column D, although the difference between UK and Germany is marginal)

Data Source:

†France – http://www.renewablesinternational.net/new-pv-feed-in-tariffs-in-france-and-negotiations-in-italy/150/452/30408/

Germany – http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?page_id=2740

Spain –  Royal Decree 1565/2010

††European Commission Joint Research Centre

2.3 Current tariffs for solar PV provide sufficient income for companies such as Ecotricity to build them. We planned to build ten new installations over the next two to three years which would have generated 50MW of electricity for our customers that otherwise would have come from brown sources. However, under the proposed changes, it will not be financially viable for Ecotricity and other companies to build any new large solar schemes at all and hence the installed capacity of solar will be significantly reduced from what it could have been.

2.4 Cutting the tariff to align with decreases in equipment costs has not been implemented appropriately. The consultation document states that the cost of solar PV hardware has fallen by 30% over the past year, something we would not disagree with, though we feel this was anticipated by the last government in the current FiT tariff rates. However, the proposed 75% cut in tariff for large solar is more than twice the level of the cost reduction which the government says it is addressing. It is hard to understand something so clearly out of step as a claim to be reflecting a 30% cost reduction with a 75% payment reduction.

2.5 The alternatives to the Government’s proposed changes are:
i) Adjust the 250KW -> 5MW tariff band down to a maximum of 1MW or 2MW to reflect the big difference in economies of scale. With the current tariff the rates of return of 1 or 2MW projects are much less than at the 5MW scale. Ecotricity is currently building a 1MW project and would be prepared to share the economic model for that with the government to illustrate this point.

Q3: Do you agree or disagree with the proposed timing of the change in tariffs including the implementation date of 1 August 2011 and that the tariff change will apply to all installations with an eligibility date on or after that date? Please give reasons for your answer. If you disagree, please provide evidence to support an alternative.

Disagree

Comments:

3.1 If the proposed change to the tariff is to go ahead, it should not be brought forward. Leaving April 2012 as the cut off date is unlikely to see much further uptake from large scale solar installations, will ensure consistency in the industry and avoid campaign and legal pressures from the solar lobby.

3.2 If there is a determination to reduce tariffs for large scale solar PV, proper transitional arrangements are required to ensure that damage to the industry’s confidence is kept to a minimum.

3.3 The consultation document notes that changes to the tariff will only impact new entrants and not retrospectively affect existing schemes. However, there is still uncertainty about which installations will be included or excluded – does this refer to those installations that are commissioned or those that are under construction or at the planning stage?

Of course all solar PV installations that have already been commissioned should be allowed to benefit from existing tariffs. However, it takes some six months from start to finish to build, and commission a large solar project, it would be unjust of the government not to reflect this lead time when implementing such a dramatic and sudden rule change. Much of the industry would no doubt wish to see all projects which are at the planning stage allowed to proceed at the current tariff. Although Ecotricity shares that desire, we do not believe this is remotely attractive to the government. We also believe that to draw the line so that projects commissioned or under construction (before the August date) are allowed to proceed on the original basis – would be fair enough. These are the projects for which the greatest commitment and investment (and risk) has been made. If the April 2012 date were chosen then it would be fair enough to choose commissioning as the entry criteria for the original tariff rates.

Q4: Can you provide any further information or evidence on predicted uptake of installations or other insights that you think DECC should be aware of about how the market for PV is evolving in the light of FITs?

Comments:

Our own research informs us that the potential for large scale solar projects coming forwards in the next 12 months has been greatly exaggerated by the media, and to some extent by developers themselves. As we write this we are the only developer in the UK that has started work on a large scale solar project. We have talked to most, if not all, of the other developers that have planning consent – they number only 14 – and without exception none of them have finance in place and the other project essentials, such as grid connections and EPC contracts (for the supply and build of the project). The Government’s widely announced intention to reduce PV tariffs and do so very quickly has undoubtedly had an impact – but this situation (set out above) existed before that announcement was first made. Large scale PV is a new technology to the UK and potential developers of it are finding for themselves that it is considerably harder to deliver then it may appear. Banks in particular are wary of the technology risks.
We believe the government has been misled as to the extent of the uptake of large scale solar tariffs.

CHAPTER 2: STUDY IN THE UPTAKE OF FITS FOR FARM-SCALE ANAEROBIC DIGESTION (AD)

Q5: Do you agree or disagree with the proposed new tariff bands and tariffs for farm-scale AD? Please provide evidence to support your view. We would be particularly interested in quantitative evidence of the capital and operating costs of farm-scale AD schemes.

Disagree

Comments:

Ecotricity’s view is that waste plant matter is better used on farms as fertiliser. By over stimulating the economics of farm scale AD the government risks diverting waste streams that would naturally be used for composting and then as fertilisers (natural ones as opposed those that are made using fossil fuels) to the production of electricity – in effect turning plant matter into electricity on the one hand and therefore having to use more fossil fuel to make fertilisers on the other hand. It also risks stimulating a market for energy crops which would compete with food production. Farm scale AD plants to make electricity are not something that should be promoted, in our opinion.
It is perhaps worth noting that under the government’s view of FiT arrangements, any uptake of AD tariff monies by the farming community will be at the expense of small scale solar.
If the government seeks to provide financial support to the farming community (via enhanced AD support), this is something that large scale solar does very effectively.

Q6: Do you have any other views and associated evidence on the slow uptake of farm-scale AD under FITs to date?

Comments:

The uptake of farm scale AD is entirely comensurate with its contribution to UK energy and climate targets. We do not believe that this uptake is slow.

Q7. Do you consider that controls are necessary to prevent the wholesale expansion of energy crops for AD? If so what do you consider to be the best way to implement these controls to be considered in the comprehensive FITs review?

Agree

Comments:

The way to prevent this is to leave farm scale AD support where it is.

We’re building the UK’s very first Sun Park right now, next to our big Wind Park in Lincolnshire and it should be up and running in April. But it might be the UK’s first and last, if the government delivers on the rhetoric of the last few weeks.

Ecotricity has over 50MW of Wind Parks now, with about 200MW more in planning – it’s taken us fifteen years to get here BTW. We see the potential to build enough Sun Parks to achieve a 50/50 mix of wind and sun – in as little as two years time – because solar projects have none of the planning problems that onshore wind does. And these two sources of energy are complementary, for example you get more of one in the winter and more of the other in the summer. And we’re expecting to learn a lot, as an energy company, from one of the world’s first hybrid Wind and Sun projects (the first project we’re building). It’s very much a Brave New World.

Or rather it was. Along comes the government and says: “We don’t like the sound of solar farms. They’re going to hoover up all the money available from the Feed in Tariffs (FiTs), and harm the market for household solar power” Or words to that effect. But that’s not being strictly honest, because there isn’t a limited pot of money under FiT legislation. We’ve checked our understanding with Ofgem and they agree – there is no pot, and no way that one technology can succeed at the expense of any other.

In any event there have been over 20,000 applications so far for domestic rooftop installations, that’s actually going rather well! While the UK has yet to get it’s first large solar farm. It seems a little premature to be worried, even on the basis of misunderstanding the rules…

There are other bits of government disinformation that need tackling too –

It’s been said that large scale solar projects are taking advantage of a loophole in the Feed in Tariff regulations.

And that the last government never anticipated large scale solar projects taking part in FiTs.

Neither claim bears the slightest scrutiny – the rules of FiTs are clear, big solar is an intrinsic part of it, who in their right minds could think that rules specifically allowing solar projects of up to 5MW (or 25 acres of land) were an oversight or something. On the contrary the last government knew exactly what it was doing. The new government simply wants to change the rules – they should say so.

And then we can have a proper debate on the merits of their plans. For example in these times of serious financial constraints (and big cuts), when we also need to achieve progress towards green energy and carbon reduction targets – more than ever we need value for money in everything (the government even says so) – so how can it make sense to choose to support domestic solar at the expense of large scale solar, when the latter is 30% cheaper (FiT regulations ensure that). We get three for the price of two if we spend our money on big solar rather than small solar – three units of green electricity for the price of two, three units of carbon reduction for the price of two.

It’s hard to fathom. The rules don’t allow one technology to adversely impact any other, FiTs were designed to enable big solar, and it offers far better value for money – so why does the government want to kill it off at birth?

I think it’s about ideology, about the countryside. I just wish the government would be honest with us, and rather than demonize big solar in a series of ministerial announcements (from three ministers now Gregg Barker, Chris Huhne and most recently Charles Hendry) just tell us the truth, big solar might spoil the countryside or something.

Then we can have an honest debate on the facts.

More recently Nick Clegg reiterated their intention/promise that this will be the greenest government ever, while presenting these proposed changes (to kill off big solar) as something in the public interest. It’s hard to see greenness in this policy ‘emergency stop’ though. This government did not create FiTs it inherited them (so no cred there) and rather than enhance them they propose to restrict them by removing big solar from the mix, and capping the total spend. There was no cap before, that’s a coalition government change – presented as a saving, based on the tenuous proposition that the previous government estimated the cost of FiTs to be £400 million (in 2014/15) – and so by limiting the spend to 360 Million, there’s an actual saving…… (the ‘saving’ would be some 50p per household per year BTW – big whoop)

With electricity consumption in the UK split roughly two-thirds business and one third domestic, the £360 million cap equates to £5 per year per household (on their energy bills). Is that really too much to pay. Oil prices have risen sharply recently, and not for the first (or last) time – the impact this has on household energy bills is far (far) greater than £5 a year – better to spend that money (all our spare money in fact) on indigenous energy sources, than pay it to global market speculators (many of whom are banks by the way).

And then there’s jobs; Remember all the talk of new green jobs before the election? Germany has 133,000 people employed in it’s solar sector now and 17,000MW capacity installed – in a 10 Billion Euro a year industry. We in the UK have a measly 60 odd MW.

Brave New World indeed. More 1984 in my opinion, all propaganda and Doublethink. Cuts are boosting renewable energy, capping an estimate is a saving and big solar is the bogey man.

Here’s another example of disinformation – Chris Huhne on Yougen – “The key point is that if people want to do solar PV at scale on the same subsidies which were designed for small solar, we need to be careful as the comparison will not be with small solar, but with onshore wind. In that comparison onshore wind looks much more economic.”

Large scale solar does not get the same subsidy as small solar – it gets 30% less – it gets support designed for large scale solar. To say, or suggest, otherwise is just wrong. And why compare it to onshore wind – if that’s the governments approach they should compare offshore wind to onshore (one costs twice as much as the other) and overhaul their policy on that – there’s no value for money in offshore wind if onshore is the benchmark.

So there it is, a veritable blizzard of ministerial disinformation to soften us all up for the pulling of the plug on big solar. After the consultation process of course, the outcome of which hasn’t been prejudged….

We’re building the UK’s very first Sun Park right now – it may well be it’s one and only. And that looks just plain daft to me.

Cheers.

Late last year Ecotricity launched a new initiative and, as it turns out, a new product. We dubbed it Ecobonds and it was a runaway success.

We set out to raise £10 million and we actually received some £15 million in applications with another £3 million that didn’t make it in on time. It was a huge success.

We’d been considering launching a bond issue for a year or two. We had two main purposes in mind.

The first was to fill a funding gap that we knew would arrive one day. Our model at Ecotricity is to use customer energy bills to build new sources of Green Energy – something we describe as “turning Bills into Mills” and it’s a model that works very well. When we build a new Green Energy project we use a mixture of debt and equity, typically 80% debt and 20% equity. We fund the 20% equity from our own resources, from the money we make. And we’ve always known the day would come when our project pipeline, those consented and ready to build, would outstrip our ability to self fund the equity part. Creating the Funding Gap.

And this is where the Ecobond idea came in, as a potential way to raise that equity proportion as debt – I think that’s known as Mezzanine Debt – and it comes with a hefty interest rate, typically 13 to 15%. Which would kill most of our projects. We looked at it but couldn’t make it work.

Our second main purpose was to give something back to our customers, many of whom over the years had asked how they might be able to get involved in our work, financially. And we also wanted to give people a way to get involved in the Green Energy revolution (financially) – without having to install stuff on their roof tops. Not everybody wants to do that and not everybody can.

Anyway, that’s the background.

In the summer of 2010 we could see our Funding Gap coming for 2011 and we started to flesh out the idea.

We reached out to customers and non customers via our web site, to get feedback on the concept and its main terms. The clear message we got from that was that five years was too long and £1,000 too big a minimum. So two of the eventual key terms of our Ecobond came out of that – a four year term and £500 minimum. The idea was to make this bond issue as accessible to all as we could. Our customers helped us do that.

At the same time – we were also aware that bank rates for savers were at historical lows; despite the fact that banks were asking very high rates from businesses that they were prepared to lend to. It seems like the incredibly low base lending rate (0.5%) is only relevant to savers (what the banks pay) and not to borrowers, strange that. There are probably something like five percentage points difference, between what a bank pays savers and what it charges borrowers like us. We thought that was a bit of a rip off.

And so our Ecobond became a way to ‘cut out the middlemen’ the banks who, post the credit crunch were paying savers very little, while lending to business for much more. We thought Ecobonds could introduce a little fairness into the financial sector.

And funnily enough, that’s exactly how Ecotricity got started. It was back in 1995, I was trying to get a fair price for a new kind of electricity (the green kind), from windmills – and the big electricity companies just laughed at the idea and refused to pay anything like a fair price; without which building more windmills was looking impossible. But since the electricity market had just been liberalised and anyone could set up an electricity company, the monopoly they had been comfortable with was no longer in place.

Ecotricity was set up to ‘cut out the middlemen’ and go direct to the end user of electricity, to get a fair price.

Ecobonds is a very interesting parallel, 15 years later, it’s a way to cut out the middlemen – a way for savers to lend their money directly to us.

That’s our Ecobond then – a power to the people kind of initiative, a novel way to raise finance, for green progress – and to engage with people and get things done between us. It’s innovative, pragmatic, populist and commercial all at the same time…..

We launched it as a four year bond, with £500 minimum and a quite generous 7% interest rate – which we boosted to 7.5% for customers.

And it went down a storm.

With £15 million of applications we had a good and bad situation – we had raised the £10 million we needed, but would have to disappoint some people – and give £5 million back (How awful…. ).

We spent a week modelling outcomes, to try and strike a balance between prioritising customers (for their years of support to us) and at the same time not massively disappointing all those people who were not customers, but clearly willing to support our work.

We ended up allocating about 70% to customers and 30% to others.

In making that choice we also willingly chose to pay more interest than we needed to (customers getting half a percent more). We were chuffed to do that.

We’ve put the money raised straight to work. First project to be funded this way is our windmill powering a solar panel factory in Wales – nice bit of ‘perpetual motion’ there….

And we’ve started work on the UK’s first grid scale Sun Farm – which we gained consent for in December last year. We break ground in a couple of weeks and should be up and running by March.

In total we’ve got 20MW of Wind and Sun projects planned for construction in 2010 – a 40% increase in our capacity – all funded (the gap part anyway) by Ecobonds.

Oh – and I’m off to Number 10 next week to present the Ecobond concept – no really I am…

It seems that we’ve created a way to speed up the rate at which we can build green energy projects (that the UK so badly needs). Good job too since we have about 150MW in the planning system now and another 100MW goes in this year.

It’s a very exciting outcome and opens the way to a big increase in our work.

Ecobonds are set to become a permanent part of what we do – we now have a financial product to offer with a very Eco outcome, alongside energy.

Ecobond Two is in planning and expected launch end of this summer in readiness to fund our build plans for 2012.

Viva the Financial Revolution…….

Without an obvious reason, like lightning for example, we were stumped for a few weeks and into that vacuum stepped a number of ideas as to probable cause. And the story grew from there, and flew round the world.

We promised we’d publish the final Health & Safety report as soon as we got it, and this has taken quite an incredible length of time to get – we got it last week. So here it is.

It doesn’t contain any mention of Aliens, Noodle Monsters or Flying Cows, but it does mention ‘classical fatigue breakage loss profile’ quite a lot. It seems to have basically come down to a manufacturing/tolerance issue – or a gap (between the blade flange and blade adapter – where the blade meets the hub). This gap put extra pressure on certain bolts (that hold the blade on), and eventually they broke.

Our best guess is that the blade that fell off, hit another one on the way down – leaving one whole blade on the turbine, one broken and one on the floor (worse for wear). The surviving blade is now on display at the Ecotech Centre in Swaffham (Norfolk) if anyone wants to see it, or run a Geiger counter over it or something….

The speculation was actually great fun, but the fun is over – this report states categorically that:

“The public initial reports and remarks concerning an extraneous cause by third parties e.g. flying objects are already and definitely excluded.”

Sad but true. Unless you think it’s a cover up of course…..

All the other turbines were checked – no gaps found, or loose bolts. This appears to have been a one off. Certainly it hadn’t happened before and hasn’t since.

So not much more to add really, but there’s plenty of detail in the report if you fancy it.

Final report – one page summary (PDF 32KB)
Final Report – full (PDF 2.6MB
Final Report – amendment (PDF 3.9MB)

OK you could have blinked and missed it – but in a Groundhog Day moment, Green Britain Day happened again – yesterday. Although ‘happened’ might be a bit of a euphemism for something that ever so didn’t (happen).

Guessing that response might be poor, we thought we’d help EDF out. So we asked b3ta (a satirical website) to launch an ‘Image Challenge’ – a challenge to produce some alternative creative concepts for EDF’s Green Britain Day.

And what a hoot that turned out to be. We got an awesome response (OK some are a little rude, OK maybe more than a little).

But on the whole – really, very funny.

Here’s a few of our favourites:

You can see the whole set here. It’s well worth checking out, especially if you need a smile…

We also issued a joint press release yesterday with Greenpeace, to try and highlight the hypocrisy of it all (GB day that is) – you can find that here.

Behind the scenes our fight with EDF over the ‘green flag’ they ‘borrowed’ rumbles on. They’ve opposed the trademark for our green flag, claiming that it is not distinctive enough to be a trademark. And at the same time they’ve applied to trademark ‘their own’ green flag – not sure how that works, must be a modern form of ‘double think’. This all comes to a head at a hearing in a few weeks time.

At stake, incredibly, is which one of us gets to use the ‘green flag’ – the (Green British) company that came up with the idea or the (French Nuclear) company that ‘adopted’ it. I’m amazed that it should even be a question or a possibility – but it is.

With astonishing cheek, even for them, EDF tried to trademark the words ‘Green Britain’ – we’ve seen that one off already. But can you imagine a French Nuclear company wanting (or getting) exclusive use of the words Green Britain…..

Of course we’re not against the idea of a Green Britain. We just think it’s a serious subject that deserves to be more than a one day a year CSR jolly from one of the world ‘s biggest polluters. There’s enough cynicism in the world over green initiatives already without fuelling the fire with ridiculous stunts like this. That’s our objection. That and the flag ‘borrowing’ of course.

Anyway, we’re declaring today to be Green France Day. After all one hollow gesture surely deserves another.

Our message to EDF is this:

We Brits can def do more to be green and we’re up for it (I think most of us are).

But you should start closer to home when it comes to greening up.

It’s not like you don’t have plenty to aim at: Is it 29 million tonnes of CO2 you produce in Britain each year? Maybe you could start there…. Any chance?

And maybe you’d like to support our Green France Day…?

Come on it could be fun…

Cheers.

Only slight bummer is that it’s planning permission for a site we don’t own – not yet anyway.

The site is on the way into Stroud (where we’re based) and it’s known as Tricorn House. It’s an ugly brute of a building that’s stood empty and derelict for a decade or so. Actually in architectural terms it’s style is described as ‘Brutalist‘.

Have a wander round (Streetview may take a few seconds to load):

View Larger Map

It belongs to an offshore property developer and he’s been unwilling to sell it or do anything with it himself for a long time now.

So last summer, working with our local council, we tried to Compulsory Purchase it and we fought a public enquiry over that. And we lost. The main reason being that the inspector thought we should have planning permission – to make our scheme more certain. It was an odd decision to say the least. But, unwilling to take no for an answer, as is our way – a few weeks ago we submitted for planning and we got our scheme consented today. That’s an important step.

We’re hoping to be back in the Compulsory Purchase process with the council in a few weeks time.

But what about the building we plan to build?

That’s where it gets exciting. We’ll have to start from scratch. Flatten the site (even with the best eco will in the world it really is beyond redemption) and build from first principles. Maximising the south facing side for passive solar heating (and maybe a little PV) while maximising insulation and minimising windows on the cold sunless north side. Using the height of the building to create air flow for ‘passive air con’ aided by cooling from underground water sources – and maximum use of natural light through translucent walls. We’ll have rainwater harvesting (it’s the moat running round the site) and grey water recycling. And living walls – walls that change colour with the seasons. And more.

Check out the images here, it is an amazing looking place.

The idea is to create a building for say 250 people, that will be as near to Zero carbon in its operation as we can make it. A building that’s inspirational to look at and work in.

The site itself is walking distance from the town centre, right on the major bus routes of Stroud, next to the cycle path and the canal – we may even get to run electric water taxis to town and back. So for getting to work with minimum carbon, it’s ideal.

That’s it – we’re a step further down the road today towards the realisation of a pretty ambitious project. All going well we could own the site by the end of this year and be doing some demolition in early 2011.

We need a name for it though, not sure Tricorn House or New Tricorn House will cut it. Open to suggestions as ever.

Cheers.

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’.

More on this later.

Cheers.

To most people that may have been interesting but not such a big deal. To anybody close to this issue it’s something altogether different.

The article runs under the headline:

Energy firm EDF abandons 2012 Olympics turbine due to ‘lack of wind’

The article doesn’t quote EDF directly but it confidently says:

“French-owned EDF Energy are not bidding to run the 393ft-tall turbine on the Games site as they were concerned about a lack of wind.

The company, London’s largest electricity supplier, said it would not be able to sell enough wind energy from the 2012 Olympic site into the national grid in future years to justify the turbine’s £2 million start-up costs.

This is an Olympic sized ‘Pork Pie’.

EDF actually failed to win the tender to build a Wind Turbine to power the Olympic games (London 2012) – about one whole year ago…!

Why on earth would they claim now that they’ve decided to walk away – from a project that had walked away from them a whole year ago?

Best guess is that EDF got wind (no pun intended, honestly) that an announcement on this project is imminent, and it looked a bit embarrassing for them. London’s largest energy supplier, big games sponsor, (and as we know a very green company… ) can’t win a single turbine contract to power the Games, on their home turf… Yep I can see how that might look.

To me, this story (in the ES) is damage limitation, a cynical attempt to get ‘a version’ out first – only trouble is this ‘version’ is fake, it’s a lie.

Did EDF plant this story or did the Evening Standard forget ‘journalistic standards’ (like having a credible source…) in their rush for a story. I know where my money goes…

It’s a bit worrying though when the company that owns the UK’s nuclear industry appears to play so fast and loose with the truth. It’s not like the nuclear industry has a big reputation for honesty (on safety issues) already.

Olympic Pork Pies are one thing, but……

Cheers.

Just a quick heads-up – Dale is just about to take part in this week’s Guardian Environment ‘You ask, they answer’ Q&A session – could be interesting… If any of you fancy chipping in your 2 penneth, dive on in – the water’s lovely!

EDITED TO ADD: The Q&A session is now closed now but it’s still worth reading.

I couldn’t say much last week except we had something I thought was pretty exciting to unveil in a few days time.  Well here it is now.

Today we’re launching Green Gas.

What’s it all about?

For a number of years we’ve been meaning to offer gas to our customers, partly because so many people use it (it’s a matter of pragmatism) and partly because we thought our customers would rather pay their gas bills to Ecotricity – and see us use that revenue to bring about some environmental gain – than pay the Big Six.

We also thought that it would give us an opportunity to engage our customers in a debate about gas and our need to wean ourselves off it – since it’s running out soon enough.

We thought we’d use the revenue to plant trees or plant more windmills, for a green outcome – the one thing we definitely were not going to do though was to ‘carbon offset’.

Up until recently we’d had bigger issues to wrestle with on the electricity front – basically getting the systems in place to ensure good accurate billing on time and so on – getting it right in electricity, before seriously looking to add gas.

We’ve been running those new systems now for over a year and we’ve achieved an enormous transformation in all areas.

And so we thought it time to look into gas once more.  And we found something very exciting had become possible – the production of gas from renewable sources and its injection into the gas grid.  Nobody is doing it in the UK yet, but it has started in other parts of the world – to be clear I mean the grid injection part – making biogas is not so new of course.

It’s now possible to offer actual Green Gas – renewable gas.  Not just gas with some kind of bolt on outcome.

And it fits perfectly with our green electricity model – we can take gas bills and turn them into Gasmills.  As we do electricity bills into Windmills.

And that’s our plan, to start supplying gas to our customers and to invest the revenue from those bills into the building of Gasmills – changing our fuel mix over time (from Brown to Green) as we do with electricity.

We’ll publish an annual Fuel Mix Disclosure for our gas (known in the industry as FMD), there’s no legislation for that, it just makes sense.

This is the UK’s first Green Gas initiative (it won’t be the last though – we’re sure of that)

And truly Eco Dual Fuel has arrived.

There’s an exciting big picture to all of this.

The UK has the potential to make 50% of it’s own gas needs from this process – Anaerobic Digestion (AD).   We could aim to provide the other 50% through demand reduction, energy efficiency measures and the use of renewable heat sources like solar thermal.  And that gives us the opportunity for, and the vision of, a Britain that’s Gas Independent in the future.

The North Sea supplies run out in about 20 years, we already import 50% or so of our gas from some pretty unstable parts of the world – the answer is to make our own.

We’re going to throw our weight into this.

Some stats if you’re interested.

Making 50% of the UK’s gas from AD would take about 1200 large Gasmills and an investment of about £35 Billion.

For Ecotricity to achieve a 50% FMD in self made green gas, as we have in green electricity – would take an investment of about £50 Million.

And spookily enough that’s what we’ve spent so far, getting to (almost) 50% self built green electricity – about £50 Million.

I’m truly, massively excited about the prospects for this, it’s a real viable solution to a problem that otherwise just didn’t seem to have one.

Ecotricity is in the process of evolving into a green energy company (from a green electricity company) – with gas and electricity both going from brown to green.

It feels like we’ve been a one legged football player, up until now.  We had half the moves.  Now we have the whole.

Oh, nearly forgot to mention, we’re going to price match dear old British Gas and match their dual fuel discount.  Continuing our philosophy of ‘green for the price of brown’.

If you’re interested in having Green Gas – you can register for more information over on the Ecotricity site. There’s also a press release here and an Observer article here.

Cheers.

The ASA said:

” ..we considered that consumers were unlikely to infer from the ads that EDF was a ‘green’ company, we concluded that the ads were unlikely to mislead.”

“..we considered that consumers were unlikely to infer that EDF Energy was a British company. We therefore concluded that the ads were unlikely to mislead.”

EDF had this to say:

“EDF Energy welcomes the decision by the Advertising Standards Authority regarding our Green Britain Day and Team Green Britain advertising, in which neither challenge has been upheld by the authority… We are committed to leading the energy change to bring about a low carbon future and we have led the way among energy companies in making long-term commitments to the environment and to sustainability… EDF Energy is the UK’s largest generator of low carbon electricity.”

Dale had this to say in response:

“To most people a green union jack represents something or someone Green and British. And to most people EDF are neither, being Nuclear and French. And however many sugar coated low carbon blandishments EDF comes out with the truth is in the numbers – they are the world’s biggest nuclear waste polluter, one of it’s biggest fossil fuel polluters and their contribution to new renewable capacity and to green issues in the UK is truly pitiful.

The ASA offer no evidence to back their judgement, which is actually just an opinion dressed up – and one that ignores the hundreds of people who wrote to it to complain the ad was misleading. It makes the ASA look rather ridiculous, but then again they are an advertising industry funded body, not an independent watchdog – should we expect any better?

The funny part is that the ASA have in effect said, in their opinion – ‘nobody in their right mind would believe that EDF are green or British’

OK I paraphrase just a little, or maybe I’m inferring?…

Either way if the ASA are right it’s actually a bitter sweet day for EDF – who’ve poured tens of millions into this – dodging the ASA bullet but at what cost to their ‘green credentials’ ?

How many windmills could they have built instead…

Cheers.”

There’s lots of campaigns focussed on it right now, lots of people trying to show politicians that this is what we all want. And I hope they succeed, I think they probably already have actually. Copenhagen is all over the news and it’s clear that there’s real public pressure for a deal. That’s about the best a campaign can hope for. Now it’s up to the delegates. At least this time the US isn’t being led by an oil man/half wit.

I went to the UN conference in Kyoto, the one that put climate change on the map. A friend of mine got hold of some passes and we just turned up with no idea what to expect. Our plan was to talk anyone that would listen about the role that wind energy has to play in fighting climate change. The message went down well.

Back then hardly anyone had heard of the concept of Climate Change and even fewer people held it to be true. It was more the territory of scientists and ‘hippies’.

Actually, even back then, almost 2,000 of the world’s top scientists (the IPCC) had told the world’s political leaders ‘There is only one responsible choice – to act now.’

And Kyoto was a success. Not because the targets agreed were particularly ambitious but because targets were set at all. It was and still is an important moment in human history. The world had set its first carbon targets.

Much has changed since then. Most people today have heard of climate change and more importantly accept that we urgently need to do something about it. It’s as rarely out of the news these days as it used to be rarely in the news a decade ago.

The Kyoto accord played a vital part in this transformation, many people are hoping that a successor to Kyoto will emerge from Copenhagen. I hope so too.

But Kyoto targets have not been met. So what use are another set of targets? We actually need deeds now not words. Targets are only a small part of the story, the easy part – hitting them will take real commitment.

I’ve decided not to go to Copenhagen, partly because I don’t think I can make much of a difference and can use the time better back here. But also partly because a couple of weeks ago I met somebody here in Stroud that was trying to get there and who, I think, has an important role to play. I’ve decided to help this person get there.

I’d like to introduce her here – her name is Isabelle and she’s been chosen from thousands of applicants to be a part of the UK youth delegation at the talks – the delegation will take part and have the chance to speak. And their voice should be heard. Too often we see people with 10 or 20 years left to live opposing windmills and other initiatives that are essential to the hopes of young people today – to have any kind of decent life. Young people have more skin in this game than the people in power today and those that wield influence at planning – they’ll pick up the tab for our failure. That’s why I think their voice is important.

You’ll be able to follow Isabelle’s progress at the talks here, she’s going to try and find the time to blog for us, it should be a fascinating insight.

With no more ado, here’s Isabelle’s first guest post –

Cheers.

The road to Copenhagen

After nearly 20 years of endless conferences, discussions, and empty promises to cut emissions we have finally run out of time. This December when the world meets in Copenhagen it will be our last chance to agree an effective global deal. It has to be now because we won’t get another shot.

Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft

My name is Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft and I’m from Stroud. I am one of 23 young people travelling to the Copenhagen Climate Conference 2009 this December as part of the UK Youth Delegation, on behalf of the UK Youth Climate Coalition.

Being on the delegation is a big commitment. So why am I prepared to put so much of my time and energy into this? Because climate change isn’t about polar bears, it’s about everyone I know and care for; my friends, my family and our future. As a young person I cannot escape climate change. I can choose to bury my head in the sand and ignore the terrifying world I will have to face later. Or I can stand up and be counted. I can start now, while we still have time, and help to build the better future that I want to see.

In September the UK Youth Delegation met with some of the UK’s core team of UN negotiators at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). They spoke about how mass public pressure on climate change is the only thing that will give them the mandate to push for a strong enough deal at Copenhagen.

The UK has done some good talking on climate change; on paper it has one of the strongest climate change policies on the world. But the action the UK has actually taken so far amounts to rearranging deckchairs on Titanic.

There’s a great deal of passion out there but the most vocal seem to be those who oppose the change we so desperately need – the anti-wind lobby is a perfect example. People need to look at a bigger picture than the view they see from their kitchen window. I am 18 and in 2050 I will be 59. I want the chance to live my life in a world with a safe and stable climate, where there is enough food and water to go around. Is that too much to ask?

Paul here (back off my hols).

A couple of event announcements for our UK based readers. Firstly – I thought you might like to know about a public appearance of the Nemesis Wind Powered Car happening on the 12th/13th September at the Science Museum in Wroughton, Near Swindon in Wiltshire. It will be part of the family oriented Festival of Innovation. I am hoping to be there with my family on the 12th – so might see you there? It is a free event (although high carbon producing transport will be charged £5 to park).

Here’s the event page for the Festival of Innovation on Facebook.

Also – Ecotricity are hosting a kite festival to celebrate the power of the wind on the 13th September 2009.

Help us to fill the sky with kites and celebrate the power of the wind at Thistledown Environment Centre, near Nailsworth (Stroud).

• Free Admission
• 500 kites to give away (or fly your own)
• Explore 70 acres of natural environment and wildlife
• Free soft drinks courtesy of bottlegreen
• Professional kite demonstration

I also created a Facebook event page for the 500Kites event too.

Take it easy, and we hope to see you at one or both

Paul

…to celebrate that relatively modern phenomenon of companies trying to sell themselves as being rather greener and more ethical than they really are. Today would be an apt day, it is after all – Green Britain Day. Where’s the Greenwash in that? Oh where to start.

Green Britain day comes to us courtesy of EDF. That’s Electricite de France to give them their full name. EDF is a French, state owned nuclear power company. They are also the world’s biggest corporate producer of nuclear waste, and one of it’s biggest traders and burners of coal – with a tiny tiny fleet of windmills (0.7% of their generation). And to promote this campaign they’ve ‘borrowed’ (as Fred Pearce gently puts it in this week’s Guardian) someone else’s logo – the green union jack. This flag symbolises two things, Green and British. EDF are of course neither.

This really does take Greenwash to a whole new level. It could almost be the plot of a slapstick comedy or a farce. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are seriously intent on convincing us Brits that they (EDF) and nuclear energy are green and good for Britain.

Stealing someone else’s clothes is not a new tactic in the world of big dirty business. And nor is Greenwash.

A few years ago the UK witnessed Fairwash, where years of truly pioneering work on the concept of Fairtrade were swamped by a tidal wave of big budget corporate look alike schemes. Everybody and their brother now has a version of Fairtrade. It might be tempting to say where’s the harm in that, the more people doing it the better. Well yes, if they truly are doing it, I would agree. But that’s not how this usually goes down. When big brands move into the ethical arena it’s for the kudos, to look like a better company, to follow a new trend and gain sales – it isn’t for the cause, it’s for their cause, which is of course to make money and to add ‘shareholder value’.

Pale corporate imitations of green and ethical brands or products are truly harmful. They distract consumers and divert spending from the real thing and they bring the risk of early onset ‘issue fatigue’. You know how it goes – Yawn, yawn here’s another company that says it pays its suppliers a decent price because it really cares about them or says it’s really committed to fighting climate change or whatever…

Maybe we need a regulator for ethical claims. We’ve got OFGEM for electricity and OFWAT for water – I propose we should name this one ETHOFF.

Let’s come back to Green Britain day. The campaign itself has laudable aims, fighting climate change and making Britain a greener place, I mean who could argue with that. Not me, that’s what I spend my life in pursuit of. But look for any substance and you won’t find it. It’s all recycled and gimmicky.

And it’s a distraction. Green Britain is a serious goal, it requires a vision underpinned by real policies, a suite of joined up actions that we can all get behind – with meaningful outcomes. It’s a mission not a PR opportunity.

EDF put more money into the Games and this Greenwash day than they spent in the last five years building new sources of renewable energy. That’s the hard numerical reality behind the bunting and the media froth. EDF – all mouth and no green trousers.

That’s why today really should become National Greenwash day.

Vive la différence

The most amazing thing has happened.

Our Green Union Jack – the one that Ecotricity’s been using for the last three years or so, has been ‘borrowed’ by another energy company.

We’re used to the Big Six energy companies behaving badly, but this is something else.

One of them decided that they liked the idea of a green union jack and the idea of a Green Britain so much – they’ve just gone and adopted it – lock, stock and barrel.

That would be shocking enough but the culprit is none other than EDF.

And that’s all the more shocking because of what the letters EDF stand for – Électricité de France, which seems just a little at odds with the adoption of the green flag… And of course the fact that they are a Nuclear power company (not everybody’s idea of Green).

A French, state owned, Nuclear power company – using ‘our flag’ (or one very close to it) to green itself up – you couldn’t make this stuff up. And they’ve submitted a Trademark application… they want to own the Green Union Jack!

This is not just a smash and grab raid on our identity (perhaps our national identity) – it’s an attempt at possibly the biggest greenwash in corporate history.

I mean these guys are not British and they are so not Green. The two things that this flag surely suggests to people.

I first saw a poster with the green union jack on it in Bristol last week. Someone had spray painted the message “EDF Climate Criminals” on it, which I thought was apt.

I went back the next day to photograph it for this post but it had been removed – we’ve recreated it in the image above anyway. Just for fun.

Now I hear that they’ve painted their service vans. And they look rather like Ecotricity’s – check these pictures and play spot the difference.

Here’s some facts about EDF:

• 85% owned by the French State.
• The worlds third largest producer of toxic Nuclear waste – but the two producers ahead of them are actually whole countries, rather big ones too – The US and Canada. So EDF are the world’s biggest corporate nuclear polluter.
• They have some 5 million domestic customers in the UK.
• And they produce about 30 million Tonnes of CO2 per year (in the UK). No small amount.
• Recently they bought British Energy – might explain why they suddenly feel so British.
• They sit at the bottom of the green spending league (of the Big Six anyway, Good Energy pip them to the very bottom…:) ) spending the least per Capita (per customer) building new renewables. A measly £10 last year. Check that table here.
• And EDF have never met their minimum legal obligation under the RO – how green is that?
• And then there’s Coal. Fred Pearce in today’s Guardian has some useful info on that front, including the fact that – EDF Trading boasts of being “one of the largest participants in the global coal market” and it imports 30M tonnes a year in to the EU, for burning in it’s own and other peoples coal fired power stations (the ultimate CO2 producers of course).

So there you have it – the French Nuclear giant, the world’s largest corporate nuke polluter, big coal trader and burner, grabbing the green jack in what looks like an attempt to have us all believe they are Green and they are British.

Quite breathtaking really. If this isn’t the greatest attempted greenwash in corporate history I’ll be even more speechless.

Anyway, we’re mobilising to do something about it.

There’s a ‘grass roots’ campaign already kicked off on the net, you can join in on Facebook here.

Legal proceedings are almost certain to follow, unless they back down in the next few days.

Nuclear is Green apparently. French is British and what’s someone else’s can easily be EDFs – that’s the Alice in Wonderland world they appear to live in.

Vive la différence.

I took some flack last week for my first post on this subject. I expected to of course. It’s not like I wasn’t advised against it. My view is that something wrong has been going on and the whistle needed blowing on it – for the greater good. Better we put our own house in order than have the Daily Mail do it for us.

I know that I wrote a strongly worded piece and if you’ve not been close to this issue over the years the passion/frustration may be hard to understand or easy to misunderstand. I’ll expand on that later – there’s an illuminating back story to tell.

And passions run high on both sides as we’ve seen, but a lot of what’s been posted has not been about the real issue here.

In this second post I want to pull the focus back to the facts.

Inconvenient facts.

For over five years Good Energy have been making a very simple, very plain English, public promise to retire a certain amount of ROCs. That’s a fact. (A list of public claims on retirement is here – they all say the same thing.)

The data from OFGEM shows beyond argument that Good Energy’s ROC retirement claims have never been met – they have never been the truth. This is also a fact.

We raised this with Good Energy two months ago, they offered all sorts of responses before finally coming up with what I’m going to dub – ‘ROC claim number two’. This was first made known to Business Green here.

‘ROC claim number two’ goes like this – Good Energy don’t retire the 5% of ROCs which they claim to (in ROC claim number one), they have a different policy which sees them retire an ‘equivalent amount’ – by which they mean something quite complex, though it boils down to less actual ROCs than claimed.

This policy has never been set out in any Good Energy documentation we can find, it’s never been made public before now – you have to wonder why. There’s a public policy on the one hand and a secret, substantially smaller, one on the other hand. Not very good practice at best. Looks like deliberate deceit to me – but that’s opinion, based on my reading of the facts.

According to Juliet Davenport (CEO) Good Energy have just been misunderstood.

Well, not by people whose first language is English I feel. A claim to retire 5% is a very simple thing to understand – impossible to misunderstand. If there’s a gulf between that claim and the actuality then the reason is the claim itself is false – it does not accurately portray the reality.

But what is this hitherto secret ‘ROC claim number two’ all about?

It’s not simple, but in effect it means that if they claim to retire 5% ROCs they will actually retire nearer 3%. Because in their own estimation it’s not the ROCs that count – it’s the value retired, so 3% ROCs retired at full value equals 5% at partial value. Make sense? I don’t think so.

OFGEM have confirmed that there is no such concept in the Renewables Obligation. It’s a Good Energy construct. Fact.

You have to ask why not just say ‘we retire 3% ROCs’ why try to big this up as 5% (while meaning ‘financially equivalent to 5% at buyout value only’ without saying so).

That’s not a very transparent way to operate. I think this is also a fact.

But the big question is this – Is ROC claim number two ‘real’?

Did Good Energy retire ROCs all this time on that other ‘unspoken’ basis?

We crunched the new numbers… Drum roll time again… No they did not!

This is also a fact.

Here’s the table showing the number of ROCs that would need to be retired to meet this ‘new policy’ set against the number actually retired with the % of the new ROC promise actually met – or not – in the final column.

Clearly this new policy has not been adhered to.

One untruth appears to be following another.

ROC claim number one, the public one, is clearly not the truth.
ROC claim number two, the fall back private one, is also clearly not the truth.
Is there a ROC claim number three?

Over to you Good Energy, ready to come clean yet?

Cheers.

It starts with this:
For the last five years Good Energy (a small UK based green electricity supplier) has been claiming to retire 5% more ROCs than they are legally obliged to do. Supposedly to encourage other people to build new green generators.

It’s been their one big claim to green fame. And it’s the single thing that’s brought them recommendations from FOE (Friends Of the Earth), NCC (National Consumer Council) and Ethical Consumer magazine – and it’s brought them customers of course.

Good Energy have repeated this 5% claim in all their marketing material and pushed the recommendation of FOE and NCC consistently now for five years. It’s been a very simple bold claim – ‘we retire 5% more ROCs than our legal obligation’ is a typical format. No wriggle room there. You either do or you don’t.

Nobody ever thought to check if they actually have been doing this though, until two months ago when we first asked OFGEM. I’m not sure why, except we know them pretty well and it seemed more than possible to us that they were saying one thing and doing another. More on this later if anyone’s interested.

OFGEM had some trouble with their systems and their data and it took about two months to get the final, final version of the numbers, although they were pretty close to the first version to be fair.

The most amazing thing is Good Energy, according to OFGEM (the industry regulator and keeper of ROCs no less) have never, ever, in all this time – met a single promise to retire 5% ROCs. Not once in five years.

There was more – For the last two years Good Energy have retired no ROCs at all…!

You have to go back three years to find a year that they actually retired any ROCs in – And then they managed just 40% of their 5% promise.

We were pretty stunned.

We dug deeper.    

The total value of the broken ROC promises, these last five years, is bigger than Good Energy’s total reported profits for the same period – had they been keeping their word, they would have been trading at a loss. Perhaps trading insolvently.

One of the biggest ironies here is that both FOE and NCC sought to offer consumers confidence, in a confusing market (they said), through their research they offered a strong endorsement of Good Energy as the greenest supplier and an ethical company.

But neither organisation undertook any actual checks, they just accepted what they were told. That’s a pretty awful thing for champions of the truth to do, IMO.

Maybe it was a subliminal thing, a company with Good in the title must be good right? Wrong it would seem, Good Energy have been dishonest to them both, not just once, but over a number of years – claiming to retire 5% while they knowingly did not.

There can be no doubt here – the claim was to retire 5% additional ROCs and the facts are that this has never even once been met.

And it’s three years since Good Energy retired any ROCs at all.

This is serial deceit, perhaps fraud is a fair description – deceit for monetary gain. Perpetrated on FOE, NCC, on customers and on shareholders – people who bought shares during this time based on profits that have been inflated by the broken ROC promises.

Customers have been paying a £100 a year or so premium to be with Good Energy, something NCC said was ‘fully justified by the ROC retirement’ – without ever checking of course. Consumers can sleep safe in their beds with champions like this on their side…

And check this, welcoming proposals from OFGEM for new green tariff guidelines, Juliet Davenport, CEO of GE wrote this in the Guardian in Feb this year:

“We must tackle these false claims for domestic green power tariffs. It’s time to overhaul the system that allows electricity firms to hoodwink customers trying to go green”

“… having called for clear rules, regulation and transparency over green tariffs for several years, I thought I would offer some clarity.”

“While they may not be perfect, we feel the guidelines could shine a welcome light into some murky waters.”

The most breathtaking and bare faced hypocrisy you’ve ever heard? It is for me.

We might expect such behaviour from one of the Big Six, or big oil company and we might expect FOE to be jumping all over them for it – where are you now guys?

Worse part for me is this:
Good Energy’s purpose in the last five years has been to try and force on the UK market this philosophy of ROC retirement – something that we have been arguing all this time is ineffective (it does not lead to new capacity) and too costly to be affordable. Ripping up ROC certificates is a waste of customer money, money better spent building something, that’s been our stance and for that we’ve been slated by FOE and NCC.

So yes, it’s rather a schadenfreude moment for us.

Good Energy have been putting profits before promises, deceiving the consumer groups that have been recommending them – trying to foist their, now clearly bankrupt, philosophy of ROC retirement on the rest of us, while not doing it themselves.

I am flabbergasted actually, it’s the most amazing con.

Since we first raised the issue with Good Energy they’ve offered a series of responses – first came mild offence that we should even question this, second was reassurance that the 5% retirement actually did take place, third came ‘we retire 18 months late’ – easily disproven and then dropped to be replaced by ‘we’re too busy actually, with an advert in Bath Life, to deal with this’ I kid you not.

We also flagged it to FOE and NCC – they’ve both been slow to react, simply asking Good Energy if they really have retired the 5% ROCs and, it seems, happy to accept the assurances that they have. OFGEM meanwhile maintains that they most definitely have not.

It’s time for Good Energy to just come clean. The promise was simple, the failure is as equally simple as it is total. No more lies pls guys.

Cheers.

ETA: Here’s a table with the figures for a more complete picture:

I’m not flagging this here to promote it, or brag about it – it’s just that it’s out there and I think I should say something about it. This kind of thing is easily misunderstood.

The ST have me down as worth £85 Million – this years sixth highest new entrant BTW – bit like top of the pops I thought…

We spotted it sat in a coffee shop, my partner Kate, Rui (our bubba) and I.

“You’re worth more than Robbie Williams” was Kate’s (almost) first comment – followed rather (too) swiftly by “let’s go shopping” …

There’s two things I wanted to say.

First – I’ve not suddenly got an awful lot of money, this £85 Million is what the ST team reckons Ecotricity is worth, and since I own that they say it’s what I’m worth. I guess that’s fair enough, but it is a paper thing. I suspect it is for most of the list. I did tell them BTW a few months ago (when they asked) that the value of Ecotricity was academic, because it’s not and won’t be for sale.

The second thing is I know this could just look plain wrong to some people – like the wind NYMBYs for example who for many years now have been saying this is all about the money not the environment etc etc. I can live with that, been living with their stupidity for a while now…  I do care what some people think though. Thing I wanted to say was that, although it makes me a little uncomfortable, on the whole I think it’s a good thing this Rich Listing– here’s why.

To 99% of people on the street (my guess – not a researched stat..) money is the one simple and single measure of success and that holds especially true for the media. If you’re rich, you’re successful, so you must know something worth knowing or do something worth doing and you must be worth talking about or to. It gives you a voice, even if you’re stupid, unfortunately…

It’s an endorsement IMO of green electricity, of Ecotricity, of environmental and social business concepts and so on – this whole alternative way of doing things that gets talked about here and elsewhere, will look a lot more credible to a lot of people now. How much that will matter or help I can’t guess, but I know that this puts green and ethical stuff up the radar, the stuff we’re talking about and doing, works well. Well enough anyway for the fans of money to spot it.

Anyway that’s it, I’m still me – take a pinch of salt with this Rich list thing – and please no begging e-mails, I’m actually a bit skint right now…

Cheers.

Every year we publish what we think is a compelling statistic – the amount of money each electricity company in the UK spends building new sources of green electricity. We express this number as £ per customer because we think that has most relevance for people. In effect it tells you how much from your electricity bill is spent by your power company building new green power sources.

In my opinion it’s a statistic that gets to the heart of the issues, cuts through the greenwash and spin of the Big Six and the small independents – it’s The Measure to me, of whether your deeds match your words.

This weekend we published the fifth annual League Table of UK electricity companies, ranked by this spending measure, and with it a five year average.

The five year average adds a new perspective. We can all have good and bad years and so one year in isolation needs to be viewed with a little caution or wider knowledge.

But five years is five years.

It makes interesting reading. The Big Six are averaging less than £30 per customer per year on new green build – the relevance of that is that the Renewables Obligation places an obligation on all power companies to increase by roughly 1% per year their proportion of green electricity – and that 1% should cost roughly £30 per customer.

So these guys that spend tens of millions on their TV adverts and the like to convince us all that they are really green, and who offer 100% green tariffs (often at a premium) to a few customers – are actually falling to meet their tiny legal minimum targets. That’s the big thing I see from the stats.

And the small indie sector is actually worse – Green Energy and Good Energy may call themselves Green and Good, but they spend nothing at all, make no contribution to new green sources of power.

The Observer picked the story up this weekend.

And Centrica ‘hit back’ apparently. Their defence..? That Ecotricity wasn’t taking into account their promises of what they might do in the future. Damn right we’re not.

Promises are adding hot air to the environment not taking it away…

The Big Six seek to deceive us all with their marketing. The number of windmills they have in their adverts are inversely proportional to the number they have in the real world. And the small guys are actually worse.

I know that some people criticise this measure (£ per customer), but I don’t think there’s a better way to measure things. My logic goes like this.

We can’t fight climate change or create energy independence for the UK unless we build new sources of green electricity. The UK has about 5% today and needs say 50% ASAP. Electricity companies must take responsibility for that, they supply the stuff. We all use it so we have responsibility too.

It’s little use to a consumer of electricity (looking to choose the right company to be with) to quote the vague promises of future spend. Or the total spending in one year, because companies vary in size.

How much gets spent on behalf of each customer or in effect from each bill is a bang on way to represent the change that you can bring with your electricity bill, by switching to company X ,Y or Z. It empowers and cuts through the crap.

It’s actually an equal measure for companies of all sizes. And it can also be used to measure performance against the minimum legal targets.

The Big Six whinge when we use it – but guess what, two of them use it themselves. Scottish Power recently claimed to spend more per customer than any other ‘major supplier’ and Powergen did the same a few years ago.

In both cases they exclude Ecotricity from their ‘claims’ – they like the £ per customer, as long as it’s only between the big six.

Funny that.

Cheers.

We’ve just had the interim report from ENERCON, the manufacturer of our wind turbines, and they say that they found ‘classic signs of fatigue failure’ in the ring of about 30 bolts, that usually hold the blades on.

Interestingly though they’ve ruled out material or other defect in the bolts themselves, judging that the bolt fatigue is more likely ‘effect’ than ’cause’ of the blade loss.

The attention has shifted now to the components on either side of the ring of bolts, the theory being that a failure somewhere else in the chain of components is at the root of things.

We’re expecting a final conclusion in a couple of weeks and hope to be able to publish the report in full here.

Meanwhile it’s sad but true to say it looks like we’ve not been visited by beings from another planet (unless you count the Sun reporters… ) and it wasn’t some kind of kill crazy flying tank from the MOD. A rather more mundane everyday kind of explanation appears to be emerging.

BTW this also means it wasn’t, def wasn’t, some kind of ball lightning or plasma – and of course not ice falling in cow sized lumps…

Shame in a way, the truth seems rather tame by comparison.

Cheers.

Where to start… OK – ROCs and REGOs.

ROCs derive from the UK’s Renewable Obligation that obliges all suppliers to hold certain small percentages of ROCs as a proxy for having green electricity in their mix – this % goes up each year by about 1% and is currently approaching 10% as an annual obligation.

ROCs are widely traded separately to power. For example the Big Six are always drastically short of ROCs and seek to buy them as stand alone bits of paper wherever they can.

Good Energy are also short of ROCs which seems odd when you think that they buy 100% green electricity from the markets and their obligation for ROCs is still in single figure percentages by contrast. The reason for that is that GE buy most of their power without ROCs.

Ecotricity is long in ROCs. This year our own green energy is over 50% of our fuel mix. The 37% figure BTW is last year – all Fuel Mix Disclosure is a year in arrears – because electricity supply isn’t complicated enough… So Ecotricity has over 50% ROCs and needs less than 10% – roughly speaking.

When financing windfarms the income from selling ROCs is half the total windfarm income – it’s a vital component. That’s one reason we think retiring ROCs is a crazy self defeating idea – ROCs are designed to make windfarms economically viable, so that more get built, and they do that well. To ‘retire them’ is close to self immolation … Well it is if you’re about building anyhow.

The other reason we’re against the practice is that it achieves nothing (except false hope) – the ASA have banned the claim that ROC retirement leads to more building – because GE and others have been unable to prove it. Won’t go into more here, it’s just something that sounds good in principle but in practice it’s nonsense.

So Ecotricity uses ROCs for what they are intended. GE uses them for greenwash IMO.

It’s the customer that pays for ROC retirement though.

ROC retirement is at least part of the reason that Good Energy are the UK’s most expensive electricity supplier. Or is it?

Anthony says Good Energy claim to retire 15% ROCs – the claims made by their team on the phone do indeed vary widely up to and beyond this amount. But the actual official claim is 5% of ROCs. This is the claim that GE made to NCC and to FOE et al for the last 5 years. NCC said this explains the (hefty) premium for Good Energy.

It doesn’t though – this amount of ROCs would cost about £25 per customer whereas the premium was £80 a year when NCC wrote that. (BTW it’s only £50 as of this week)

GE has been talking about building new green sources for 10 years or so, since the day they got started in energy supply. It may well happen one day. They came up with the idea of ROC retirement because it was something they could do and they needed a green story, an edge to claim greater greenness from. It’s not more than that. It’s an all but abandoned philosophy now.

There is more to this story though, something rotten at the heart of it all – coming soon.

Moving on to REGOs – these are certificates based on an EU wide scheme to verify and demonstrate the veracity of fuel source. Each unit of green generated gets one and each unit of green sold has to have one attached to them. Fuel Mix Disclosure is EU wide law and uses REGOs as evidence of source. REGOs are sold separate to power though. And it doesn’t matter for reasons of practicality/laws of physics.

This links to my comments that basically you buy non de script power in the wholesale markets, attach a REGO and it’s green. At its simplest this is because we can’t direct the flow of electrons to our customers and the grid system is a big mixing pot. Inputs are measured and can be offset against outputs – and that’s how the system works. But specific electricity can’t be delivered, so bits of paper are used to make sure that things like greenness are only sold once.

Moving on then to how many windmills will it take to power the UK. The rough rule of thumb that I use is it takes 1,000 MW to meet that 1% annual RO increment – it’s close but not forensic BTW.

On that basis we need 100,000MW of wind to power the whole UK – not allowing for issues of demand and supply balance – just total use.

That’s 50,000 of our 2MW machines, 33,000 of today’s typical 3MW machines and only 20,000 of the 5MW machines that are now appearing and will surely dominate in the future. Turbines up to 10MW are highly likely – that would obviously only take 10,000 – the reality will be a mixture of turbine sizes of course, as we build as we go.

As to land use – Many years ago an outfit called ETSU (gov quango..) undertook a study of the UK’s usable wind resource on land – and the word usable is important. They concluded that we had enough usable sites for wind energy to meet our entire electrical needs 3 to 4 times over. That was almost 20 years ago, with 20 year old technology.

Looking at it another way – on the question of spacing turbines – we reckon that in any given land area a wind farm will occupy just 1% of the land itself – due to spacing needs. Jeffrey calculates for us here that 1% of the UK’s land is 360,000 turbines – that’s 3 to 4 times the number of turbines my rule of thumb says we need for 100%. Which chimes with the ETSU study.

The big caveat that needs adding is of course supply and demand balancing – and let’s not forget energy use reduction.

I don’t disagree with Prof McKay on the need for us to reduce energy use, but I do disagree with his apparent fixation on that to the exclusion of actually building renewable forms of power. The two things are not opposing forces – they are reinforcing – we need to use less and make what we have to use, from renewables.

If we can reduce our consumption by 50% we need just 50,000 of today’s turbines and just 5,000 of tomorrows…. The UK has 2,500 already BTW (although smaller and older types)

There will still be supply and demand to balance though even under the best reduction scenario. For that we have the concept of Intelligent Demand, forget the days of dumb ‘energy on demand’ we can run the grid and our lives more efficiently. And we will.

I believe that the UK should generate way more than 100% of its needs from wind (onshore of course) and should export and/or usefully ‘dump load’ using large scale Intelligent Demand – because the ‘longer’ we are in terms of wind capacity (compared to needs) the more of the time that we will have enough when we need it – and also because we have so much wind – why not use it.

The fact that wind is free and clean (and endless) requires a new mindset to some degree – we need not be constrained by our total annual usage, let’s build 200% or 300% wind for example – generation will match demand more often/easily and there must be many good things we can do with that (surplus) energy. Just a thought.

I think that might cover most of the points! Cheers all.

Much of the debate taking place here seems to be over the potential environmental impact of the proposed Barrage and its technical feasibility. I’m not even close to being expert on either issue.

The possibility of silt killing the Barrage seems to be one of the major feasibility issues, and Neil Law presents a pretty compelling argument on that. I do struggle with the idea that something so simple and so out there (Neil’s research is based on Google and asking people – I hope that’s fair to say) could have been missed in all the studies – but then again why not. I can’t call it.

In my original post I (tried to… ) duck these issues with the opening gambit – ‘assume that on balance the Barrage is a good thing to do’. Because my real focus is not on the Barrage but on something else.

It’s the idea that the government, in this new world we might be in, could do something radical. Having expressed a desire to fund big infrastructure and with a long-standing policy aim to eradicate fuel poverty, it struck me that these threads could be pulled together. And we the public could become a power generator again.

I looked at the approximate economics of the `Barrage’ and it was clear that in conventional terms it would be challenging to build. And the way we try and deal with fuel poverty is just to keep bunging more money on the fire (so to speak). On their own, neither idea works very well, but when you put them together it’s a different story, it’s almost a piece of magic. The barrage can pay for itself, end fuel poverty and fund enormous sustainable infrastructure year in and year out. That was the gist of it.

I’ve had a bunch of e-mails as well as posts here from people telling me the Barrage is basically a bad idea – or worse, and I’m pushing the wrong thing and making a big mistake (or worse). I’m grateful for all that (honestly), but:

It’s based on a misunderstanding of what I’ve said.

I’m actually technology agnostic. I do believe that the Severn should be harnessed though, it’s too big a potential power source for us not to. And however it’s harnessed there will be impacts, and I believe that we have to accept that as a price we need to pay – the lesser of the two evils of not acting in my opinion.

Anyway, it seems there are several alternative approaches vying for attention and recognition. The Barrage of course, a Tidal Reef (which is the image above, thanks to Rupert Evans), Tidal Lagoons and of course straight forward Tidal Current Generators.

I just wanted to flag that up here, clarify where I’m coming from and thank everybody who has contributed to this discussion so far, thank you all.

The idea I’m putting forward will work equally well with any Severn Tidal scheme, indeed it will even work with Offshore wind – any big sustainable generation project could be tied to the Fuel Poverty program and achieve pretty much the same outcome.

In other news – Number 10 refused to host the petition we submitted last year, stating that “it is outside the scope of the Prime Minister or the Government”! It took a very long time to find this out, as their email to us ‘got lost in the post’.

Not sure who we are supposed to petition in that case… Obama? Cameron? Shame Jim’ll Fix It isn’t running any more

We have decided to run the petition anyhow, but here on the blog.

It started on Sunday with the kind of phone call I never wanted to have, telling me that one of our turbines had lost a blade. I use the word lost advisedly.

Our people were on site the same day, the manufacturers the next, and we set about looking for the cause. BTW, what we found, just to clear that up… , was one blade at the foot of the tower (whole), one badly mangled but still attached and one apparently unharmed and still attached.

Next thing we knew reports of UFOs in the area (at the right time) started to appear in the local press and on the web, and grew in number.

It snowballed from there… that Thursday, the Sun carried the story on its front page, fuelling the fire by claiming a blade was missing (of course it wasn’t) and the rest of the herd followed. The story ran around the world and exploded on the Net.

My Thursday started with a call from Radio 4’s Today program, at some ungodly hour, and the rest of the day was given up wholly to more radio, TV and press interviews – it was thoroughly mad. All the main TV news programs ran with it, even the broadsheets got in on the act (The Guardian claiming responsibility for the lights in the sky…! Bless) It was the kind of coverage you’d love to get for a sensible story……

Some great comments on the web, really a lot of fun – here and elsewhere. Found this one on the Guardian website:

Cows give us BSE!
Cows fart loads, releasing methane and encouraging global warming!
Cows try to sabotage our attempts at producing carbon neutral energy!
BEWARE OF COWS – They are better organised than we think!

Tickled me that one did…

To be honest we had a lot of fun with this, and that took the edge off what was otherwise a serious and very bad event for us.

But what really happened?

There were no big obvious pointers on site. No signs of ice problems. There was no foreign or dare I say ‘alien’ debris on the ground to indicate a collision and no sign of a lightning strike either. Mind you, one blade was up in the air and the other a 1 tonne dead weight on the floor, so examination was limited. But we were stumped for an answer and in those first few days it made the incredible UFO strike theory just a little more credible.

The connector (which joins the blade to the hub) – on the downed blade was cut off and sent back to Germany for some more ‘forensic’ testing, mid last week. We’ve not had any results back yet, but we keep pushing.

Oh, BTW, none of the blades will be repaired, all three will be replaced with new.

The likely culprits of this are actually quite a short list: Ice, Lightning, Collision (UFO inc), Material failure, Design failure, Maintenance failure. There’s not more.

We’ve ruled out the first two pretty absolutely. Collision we can still see no evidence for, there should be some debris on the ground (surely) and some ‘exchange’ of materials on the blade surface. We’ll get to inspect the ‘bent’ blade today – the crane arrived to rebuild this machine. It is pretty probable though as people have said here, that the fallen blade hit and broke the second blade on the way down.

The testing of the fallen blade will determine if material failure was the cause, my own feeling is that it’s not, but let’s see.

As for design fault, there are thousands of this type of machine in use, and this is the first time this has happened. It seems very unlikely.

That leaves maintenance and we’re examining the machine very closely to establish the degree to which maintenance was properly undertaken by the manufacturer.

In so far as we’ve narrowed down the options, we are closer to an understanding of what happened. But we’re not there yet. We’re left with Collision and Materials or Maintenance failure.

As for UFOs? I believe absolutely that intelligent life exists in the universe. But I doubt (as someone may have said here) that if it could get here from another galaxy it would crash into a windmill – then again accidents will happen.

The 8 tonne MOD UAV, Taranis (would that make a good car name…?), has some merit as a possible culprit (Thanks for the stats on that Peta).

But the giant space tentacle was a bit beyond the pale for me, as was the idea that aliens wanted to steal our technology – having tramped squillions of light years to find us…

All good fun. But seriously UFOs are bottom of my probability list.

As you may have heard – we have been all over the news today!

The Sun got there first with a front page this morning.

Dale really wants to blog about this – but as you can imagine he has been inundated with media calls. He is drafting a post and as soon as he has finished it will go up here.

If you want to ask any questions or want to speculate or provide any information in the meantime – please feel free to post your comments here.

Be sure to check the ‘UFO’ damage mystery round-up over on the main Ecotricity site.

UPDATE: Dale has now written a post about this – “Where’s Mulder and Scully when you need them?”

Paul

It’s got a lot going for it in that respect.

There are big questions over its impact on the ecology of the Severn Estuary, serious questions. These need balancing I think with the bigger ecological impacts of not doing enough to combat climate change.

But put that all aside for a minute and assume the Barrage is on balance a good thing to build.

At the same time the government spends £3 Billion per year on cash grants to pensioners and the fuel poor – people defined as spending 10% or more of their income on fuel. The electricity industry spends another £0.7 Billion, under pressure from the government of course.

At roughly £4 Billion – it’s a huge sum of money to spend each year. Especially to fight a losing battle, because energy costs are rising faster than standards of living – and there’s no end to that in sight.

Indeed as world energy prices rise, the amount that needs to be spent rises – just to stand still. And on two fronts – grant costs go up as energy bills go up and the number of qualifying homes goes up too.

It’s a thoroughly unsustainable situation.

And worse still (IMO) the current £3 Billion of public money goes straight into the pockets of the big six energy companies and from there to shareholders and global energy speculators. This annual £3 Billion achieves nothing but short term alleviation of a problem that just won’t go away, and won’t even stand still.

There’s a far better way to handle this – by building the Severn Barrage using public money!

And each year instead of giving cash grants – give fuel to the fuel poor.

The numbers more than stack up.

Almost £4 Billion per year saved at today’s energy prices – that’s about twice what the annual repayments of a £15 Billion loan would be if repaid over a pretty rapid 15 year period.

So we (the country) would be quids in on day one, about £2 Billion of them.

Fifteen years later, with the debt paid off – £4 Billion quids in – and that’s at today’s energy prices..! If energy prices only double in 15 years (a conservative scenario since they doubled this year..!) the surplus in year fifteen of this plan would be £8 Billion. But that’s not all:

The surplus energy, not given to the fuel poor – would be worth about £30 Million at today’s prices and the Barrage would generate a huge ROC income – some £850 Million per year. Plus LECs and REGOS, making a grand total further cash generation of £1 Billion, give or take. And all at today’s prices.

That’s £3 Billion annual cash surplus on day one – a conservative £9 or 10 Billion some fifteen years later – and that’s per year every year.

But that’s still not all:

The Barrage could power 5 million homes, that’s enough for all the UK’s ‘fuel poor’ the official and unofficial estimates – and some spare. And we’re not talking partial grants here, we’re talking total electricity needs met. A bigger help to the fuel poor than today’s ‘system’ – roughly twice as much help.

So the Barrage would wipe out fuel poverty, a long-standing government aspiration, do so in a way that is insulated from future fuel price rises, and generate a large revenue surplus to spend on other infrastructural projects – District heating for example.

Not to mention contribute 4% to the 40% national green electricity target (so 10% of the target) and save a shed load of CO₂ into the bargain.

The only losers in this will be the Big Six, boo hoo…

The failure of the banking system, for that read capitalism and ‘free markets’, opens the door to a new possibility – government intervention once more in issues that are of vital strategic (societal) importance. Like Energy.

The Government should become an energy generator (once again), stop paying huge sums to the big six each year (in cash grants), insulate itself, us and the fuel poor from future fuel price rises, take a massive step towards our national CO₂ targets, end fuel poverty completely and permanently – and generate a shed load of money for other infrastructure and sustainable development into the bargain – year in year out.

What are we waiting for? I’ll get my bucket and spade…

More info on the Severn Barrage

1. The Sustainable Development Commission report on tidal energy, “Turning the Tide” is a great starting place. The report examines in-depth the proposition for a Severn Barrage and also the possible application of tidal range, tidal stream and tidal lagoon technologies at other sites around the UK.
2. BERR’s F.A.Q. about Severn Tidal Power. This covers plans for the government’s feasibility study and various systems such as tidal barrages and lagoons, plus answers most questions. Everything from how much it will generate to flood protection. The only problem with this site is that it is all text and could do with a few pictures!
3. The Wikipedia Severn Barrage article is a good springboard in various directions (including negative aspects), but like all Wiki articles you just have to remember that anyone could have written this stuff. On the up side, it does have some pictures which is a bonus.

Online petition. Add your voice

We’ve set up an online petition here. Please add your voice. Also – an update to this post has been published here, which clarifies some of the issues raised in comments on this post.

Did an interview with BBC’s Watchdog the other day, they came to visit us here in Stroud. They’ve been on a bit of a crusade against the Big 6 by all accounts – and now they’ve decided to take a look at us Indies – to see if we offer an alternative!

They asked the ‘Green/Brown price’ question… which isn’t easy to answer in a soundbite or two but I did my best! You never know how these things will turn out – it’s all in the edit.

The piece is going out on the show on Monday 24th November, BBC1, 7.30pm.

May have something to say about it here on Tuesday – as may you..?

Watchdog page for the episode can be found here (should be updated following broadcast with video etc)