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Good (Energy) Lies – part two

Filed under: Energy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/citizen_higgs/The inconvenient facts…

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. Continue reading “Good (Energy) Lies – part two”

28 Responses

Good (Energy) Lies

Filed under: Energy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25423804@N03/Something very strange/funny/quite awful has come to light in the last few weeks.

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.     Continue reading “Good (Energy) Lies”

90 Responses

ROCs, REGOs and wind-powering GB

Filed under: Energy

Guys, just catching up on stuff, looks like a good time to jump in and try provide some answers to the questions on the ‘Why green electricity prices go up when brown prices do part 2‘ post. It was too big for a comment reply really ;)

Where to start… OK - ROCs and REGOs.

Continue reading “ROCs, REGOs and wind-powering GB”

39 Responses

Part two of Feed In Tariffs – Do they work at Home?

Filed under: Energy

This is a follow-on post from my ‘What’s Wrong With Feed-in Tariffs’ posting earlier.

It’s not un-common to hear people say ‘We need Feed in Tariffs in the UK, like they have in Germany – they’ve got umpteen Gigawatts of renewables from it’. And fair enough they do. It’s important not to confuse large scale FITs with micro though.

The problem for onshore wind (large scale) in the UK is planning not financial and therefore FITs just can’t help. We need German planning laws to emulate German success, in large scale wind.

But what about micro generation; Are feed in tariffs the answer to better deliver this? Continue reading “Part two of Feed In Tariffs – Do they work at Home?”

24 Responses

What’s wrong with Feed in Tariffs?

Filed under: Energy

I discussed Feed in Tariffs with David Cameron at our Reading turbine last week. The Tories have a policy proposal to introduce Feed in Tariffs – to do something about the lack of progress we’re making with Renewable Energy in the UK. But I don’t think this will help at all. Continue reading “What’s wrong with Feed in Tariffs?”

9 Responses

Zero Carbonista

Dale Vince This blog is about answers to the big questions - how will we keep the lights on, what kind of cars will we drive (will we drive?) and how will we feed ourselves - in a post oil world, and a world where we can't afford to keep burning things and throwing things away. Energy, Transport and Food are the three big issues.

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