the Carbon Challenge

Do you understand your energy bill?

Can you imagine a situation where your grocery shopping involved you having to guess the cost of food you were buying, with an accurate bill not arriving until three months later?  It may sound ludicrous and yet this is the way that the vast majority of us currently shop for our gas and electricity! Our latest Green Barometer IV research report, launched yesterday, highlighted that nearly eight out of ten Brits don’t know what they’re paying for their gas and electricity. I am not surprised – have you ever tried to read your electricity or gas meters? Normally they’re hidden away in a cupboard under the stairs, in the garage or in my case at the bottom of the food cupboard - hardly conducive for helping you to keep track of your energy usage!

Our study finds that energy bills are the most difficult for us to understand of any household bill: twice as hard as phone bills and four times as difficult as bank statements or credit card bills. This lack of transparency surrounding energy usage is one of the biggest problems holding back the UK's fight against climate change.  This is where smart meters come in. They include a portable display unit that can be taken anywhere in the house and which would allow you to monitor how much energy was being used at any time – as well as over days, weeks, or even months.

All well and good you might be thinking, but how will simply knowing energy consumption help people to save energy? Well, this is where I believe that the energy suppliers will have an important role to play. Unlike so-called clip-on displays, smart meters offer a two way communication system between the householder and the energy supplier. What does this mean? Well, it would allow the energy supplier to monitor and assess your home energy use, and then based on this they could offer tailored energy saving recommendations that were relevant to your needs and situation.

International trials, in places such as Sweden and the United States have shown smart meters offer an energy saving potential of between 5 and 10 per cent.  Even, using a conservative five per cent baseline, if everyone in the UK switched to smart meters British householders could save £1.2bn a year and the equivalent of 7.4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions – figures that can’t be ignored.

If you’d like to read the Green Barometer IV report then you can do so by clicking here.

Green Energy / Greenwash!

One of the problems with green electricity tariffs is their lack of transparency, with current EU regulations only requiring suppliers to provide details of the overall fuel mix of the electricity generated. Therefore the Energy Saving Trust, in coalition with energywatch, the National Consumer Council, the Renewable Energy Association sent a letter at the end of February to BERR Secretary, John Hutton and Defra Secretary, Hilary Benn asking them to make it a requirement for suppliers to reveal the renewable and non-renewable mix of every consumer’s energy supply (Click here to read the letter).

On a personal note, I want to see all green tariffs meet a standard that is genuinely green, comes from 100 per cent renewable sources of energy and delivers “additionality”. By that I mean customers know by signing up for a green tariff that they are helping to bring more renewable energy to the grid. If this isn’t achieved, we may need to introduce an extra label to make it clear which do and don’t meet these basic standards – such as our Energy Saving Recommended Scheme. This took away the confusion that people had when buying household products so they now know they are buying the best in class. The same should be true for green energy.