In an industry first, low carbon power pioneer Good Energy is stepping up its anti-greenwash campaign, launching to its enterprise customers current time-matched to generation patterns.
Aiming for full data transparency, its Granular Energy platform aims to show business clients how their usage coordinates – on an half-hourly basis – with the power they buy from the company’s renewable generators.
The new service will provide customers with 24/7 ‘carbon free energy’ data, paving the way for new levels of transparency in carbon reporting and enabling businesses to shift when they use energy to reduce their emissions.
This will be the first time a UK energy supplier has launched such a service for all of its business customers and Good Energy is offering it as standard at no extra cost.
The company is working with software providers Granular Energy to match its business customers’ usage with the output of nearly 400 renewable generators across the UK. Good Energy plans to extend the scheme’s coverage over the next year to its full community of 2,000 generators.
After first tests of the Granular Energy platform among customers such as circular fashion manufacturer Teemill and Bristol-based surfing destination The Wave, a larger pool of Good Energy customers including the Soil Association and natural skincare brand Haeckels are now trialling it.
The service will then be rolled out to all half-hourly metered business customers, including South Coast attraction Brighton i360, before the end of this year.
Good Energy’s larger business customers use around 0.25TWh of electricity every year, the consumption of a notional 92,000 households. The new product provides superior transparency in tracking carbon emissions than annual REGO certification. Businesses can use the insights to inform how they shift their energy demand and consequentially lower their carbon impact.
Good Energy has long matched its customer demand volume with the power it procures from the renewable generators it contracts with on a half-hourly basis, consistently achieving matching of over 90% in 30-minute intervals across the year.
This is the first time, the supplier believes, that customers will have visibility on how their power is matched to this level of granularity.
Sales and origination director Tom Parsons said: “Our business customers were already getting the greenest supply product on the market, as their electricity usage is 100% backed off with power purchased direct from our renewable generators.
“We’re taking this a step further by providing their hourly data matched with the output of those generators, giving them a much truer picture of their carbon impact and allowing them to focus their investment decisions on activity that will genuinely reduce their carbon footprint.
Good Energy has long been critical of the REGO ( renewable energy guarantee of origin) system. Too easily, says the firm, REGO certificates allow suppliers buying brown power to trade slips of dubious paper so they can they offer spurious ‘100% renewable electricity’.
The Chippenham-based supplier says many energy market participants, from Whitehall to the UK Green Buildings Council recognize glaring inconsistencies in REGOs. Political will is lacking though, it says, to eliminate traders’ abuses.
By working with Granular Energy, Good Energy believes it is taking the initiative to begin combatting greenwash. Nigel Pocklington, its CEO, is pictured.
Toby Ferenczi, Granular Energy’s co-founder, commented: “Time-based energy matching is the obvious next step in how we source renewable power, with the potential to revolutionise how businesses approach their carbon accounting.
As more renewable output is sourced in this way, we should start to see not only businesses incentivised to shift their demand to times of oversupply, but developers incentivised to build the tech we need to fully decarbonise our energy systems.”
For more about the service, see here.
