MSE News: Small supplier Bulb cuts energy tariff thanks to 'LOWER wholesale costs'

You’re currently paying about £710 a year on tonik.

By switching to Bulb you’ll be paying around £746 a year.

Your energy will cost £62 a month an increase of £3 a month.

FullForce wrote: »

Avro do not say they are 100% renewable, but it's the same electricity you get through the same wires & meter, no matter who you buy from

However, your money does go toward renewable sources.

Not something that I care about, but a growing number of people do so it is worth mentioning.

Now, Bulb also makes this claim: "our 100% renewable electricity leads to zero carbon dioxide emissions and no radioactive waste".

That's almost certainly between misleading and untrue, of course, so lets try getting a little closer to the truth with some questions:

1. How much radioactive material is released by the suppliers Bulb pays to produce electricity?

2. How much radioactive waste is produced indirectly by the suppliers Bulb pays to produce electricity?

Neither of those questions is likely to have none as the correct answer.

That's because burning material containing organic matter like wood or household refuse releases a range of radioactive materials onto the atmosphere, either directly or via things like burning methane from anaerobic digestion and Bulb says it pays biogen providers for 15% of the electricity produced in the most recent period. They are only not radioactive waste producers in the same sense that burning coal doesn't produce carbon dioxide waste because it releases it into the atmosphere instead. Dumping stuff into the atmosphere doesn't get rid of it even if a lawyer can claim that it doesn't meet some legal definition of whether it's nuclear waste or not. I hope that Bulb would agree that coal generators shouldn't be claiming to produce no carbon dioxide waste and that Bulb shouldn't be doing the equivalent with respect to its claims about nuclear emissions.

The second question is closer to having none as the true answer but it's almost certain that in the equipment used to generate the electricity non-destructive testing will have used nuclear sources that do ultimately become nuclear waste. Most likely in turbines of hydro-electric sources, say.

This post has mostly focused on electricity but given that ten percent of the gas purchased is not from fossil sources it appears that Bulb's sources are leading to higher levels of radioactive material release into the atmosphere than most providers. How do the Bulb-related emissions of radioactive materials compare with other UK gas suppliers?

Anyone unfamiliar with the issues should realise that fossil gas has no radioactive carbon, for example, because it's all decayed between the time the material was buried and today. But more recently living things have sequestered undecayed radioactive carbon and other isotopes and release them into the atmosphere when burned. Much of that sequestered radioactive material was originally produced during atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and the effect of this is gradually decreasing as the isotopes decay, so eventually the new biologic sources will have release levels closer to those of fossil sources.

Nobody should be worried by the discussion of radioactive material in this post. The levels involved are not generally significant on a small scale even though some of the radioactive carbon and other isotopes are absorbed into our bodies and stay there.

Will, is there a place where I can read past complaint decisions by Ofgem and the ASA on those points, without going and making a new complaint? That means in particular a past decision on the Bulb claim that "you get 100% renewable electricity". If there are no past decisions, I'm going to make those complaints myself, starting with the ASA.

So far as the radioactive emissions go it should be clear that somebody considers them significant because I'm objecting to them and going to complain about the misleading advertising unless there have been past decisions in response to complaints already.

It's true that there are releases of natural radioactive materials from fossil fuels, that's why a person living within fifty miles of a coal generation plant is expected to receive three times the radiation dose from the plant as one instead living within fifty miles of a nuclear plant. But my point was about all of the emissions, including the partly human-made radionuclides like carbon 14, not just natural ones.

I appreciate that you will be inclined to argue it because your claims are pretty. But pretty isn't enough. They also have to be accurate and not misleading, and you must hold evidence to support them and they do not meet that standard. So if you'd like to get started on considering what will happen when I complain to the ASA on one of the points it will start something like this:

'Bulb claims "you get 100% renewable electricity". Elsewhere they make conflicting statements indicating that this claim is not true and all they really do is buy renewable energy in an amount matching the amount supplied over the whole year. Please ask them to either produce the evidence to back up this claim that their customers get 100% renewable energy, as required, or to remove it and replace it with something true instead'

Naturally I'll include more detail than that, and I will do the same to enumerate each of the individual points of complaint and ask them to require from Bulb the evidence that Bulb must have to support the claims on each point.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Bulb is a bad supplier or can't come up with accurate and not misleading claims. But it does mean that today Bulb is telling its current and prospective customers that "you get 100% renewable electricity" and I'm not going to simply let Bulb continue to make that claim. Unless, that is, Ofgem and the ASA have ruled that the claim meets the required standards.