Green energy supplier

absence

Another good idea which has been mentioned is to offset my carbon emissions produced by my 3 bed semi. This may work out cheaper and be more beneficial to the environment. This would allow me to purchase the cheapest energy provider on the market, whether it's eon or npower for example and I will still be helping the environment.

penrhyn

Sounds like a better plan, if you give some money to the Woodland trust they will do something practical with it, i.e. plant trees.
http://www.woodlandtrustshop.com/carbon/capture

penrhyn

andrione1 wrote: »

I have my energy with Marks and Spencers, they say it is all green energy, nothing else, but m/s energy not available all over Uk as far as i know. i switched to M/S because they are British and green.

You are misinformed. Marks and Spencer source their energy from Scottish and Southern.
Their fuel mix is:-
Coal 25% Gas 59% Nuclear 5% Renewables 9% Other 2%.

crawling

Coal 25% Gas 59% Nuclear 5% Renewables 9% Other 2%.

Agree.

moonrakerz

I get my power from ****** ******, they burn coal, heavy oil, gas and rumours have it, even domestic waste.
My neighbour gets his power from ***** ****** and it is totally green, produced by free range dolphins turning wave generators with their tails.

What I don't understand is - how they keep his "green" power separate from my "dirty" power as they both come down the same cable. Is it done like Internet and telephone calls down the same cable - but somehow kept apart ?

Ben84

absence wrote: »

Another good idea which has been mentioned is to offset my carbon emissions produced by my 3 bed semi. This may work out cheaper and be more beneficial to the environment. This would allow me to purchase the cheapest energy provider on the market, whether it's eon or npower for example and I will still be helping the environment.

I strongly doubt that offsetting is working, or as a concept checks out. Lots could be written about it, but a couple of aspects stand out to me. Tree planting is a great thing to do for the environment and wildlife, but I'm not convinced it's a permanent solution to carbon emissions. Burning fossil fuels permanently takes carbon out the ground where it would have otherwise remained for millions of years and emits it in to the short term environmental cycles, the atmosphere, trees/plants and the oceans. Trees contain it for maybe a few decades. This isn't so very long in contrast to the millions of years it would have remained underground. At best trees can buy us time by containing it for a few decades, but they cannot make carbon taken from the ground and emitted in to the environment go away.

Carbon offsetting also does nothing to deal with dwindling fossil fuel reserves, or the environmental damage from their extraction and other pollutants such as sulphur or coal ash associated with them.

Unfortunately, I think we do need to change how we consume energy and the amount we consume. I would encourage spending money on insulation or energy saving measure around your house before spending it on schemes like offsetting. There's also the economics. Savings from more insulation or buying a more efficient boiler when you need to replace an old one are recurring reductions in carbon emissions and financial savings for you, while offsetting is a recurring expense.

noncom_2

moonrakerz wrote: »

I get my power from ****** ******, they burn coal, heavy oil, gas and rumours have it, even domestic waste.
My neighbour gets his power from ***** ****** and it is totally green, produced by free range dolphins turning wave generators with their tails.

What I don't understand is - how they keep his "green" power separate from my "dirty" power as they both come down the same cable. Is it done like Internet and telephone calls down the same cable - but somehow kept apart ?

I suspect you are being deliberately obtuse here, but for the sake of clarity: the "clean" and "dirty" power is not kept separate in the grid any more than the electricity generated from coal is separate from that generated in nuclear power stations. What matters ultimately is the proportion of each source in the overall generation mix of the company/country/world. If I buy "Green" electricity (by which I don't mean a so-called Green tariff from one of the big six, but from a company that is genuinely using and promoting renewable sources) then the overall proportion of "clean" electricity goes up and the amount needing to be generated from "dirty" sources goes down. Whose home those particular kWhours actually ends up in is irrelevant.

Ben84

moonrakerz wrote: »

I get my power from ****** ******, they burn coal, heavy oil, gas and rumours have it, even domestic waste.
My neighbour gets his power from ***** ****** and it is totally green, produced by free range dolphins turning wave generators with their tails.

What I don't understand is - how they keep his "green" power separate from my "dirty" power as they both come down the same cable. Is it done like Internet and telephone calls down the same cable - but somehow kept apart ?

If you're buying green energy to get different electrons you'd be misunderstanding how electric works and the environmental reasons for buying green energy. It doesn't matter who is billing you, electric has always come from whatever power stations are closest to your house and are generating at that time of day, even if your supplier buys no electric from them. Your supplier simply buys electric on the wholesale market from power plants which feed the national grid somewhere, and resells it to you. Somehow it all evens out, everyone pays for using it and everyone gets paid for producing it, so it doesn't really matter who uses what electrons.

The aim of buying electric from a company that only buy environmentally preferential sources on the wholesale market is that if enough people do this it creates economic incentives to produce more of this low carbon/pollution electric, and conversely less of the polluting electric.