Electric green energy

It’s time for energy suppliers to put their money where their mouths are, and invest in new wind power, says Dale Vince.

Dale Vince isn’t happy; on the face of it a state of affairs that does not make sense. For a start his business, Ecotricity, appears to go from strength to strength, recently picking up an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy. Vince himself has come in for praise too, most recently being named the New Statesman’s “most inspiring business leader”. Last, but not least, growth in demand for electricity from renewable sources marches ahead of supply.

"There’s too much focus on micro- power – nobody’s seeing the bigger picture"

But green energy’s popularity is not a reason to be cheerful. “As far as I’m concerned there’s been too much of a focu son the micro scale, while nobody is seeing the bigger picture,” he says.

That bigger picture is one in which we consumers have become convinced that we should make the switch from ‘brown’ to ‘green’ supply, but without there having been a matching growth in renewable supply (or any reduction in demand through improved energy efficiency).

It has created a situation in which too many players are now fighting for a slice of an inadequate renewable energy cake, he says. “I say to business people: ‘You can meet your carbon target this year, but what happens next year?’ There’s nothing worse than hitting a target one year and then going backwards the next.”

As long as power companies are allowed to offer people ‘green’ electricity tariffs without investing in renewables, customers are essentially being taken in, Vince maintains.The ‘100% green’ tariffs offered by suppliers are, he says, misleading. They aren’t any greener than the others; suppliers simply buy up more wind power from the companies producing it. Because their tariff isn’t adding any more renewable energy to the pot, effectively they’re pushing someone else’s emissions up so that those of their customers can ‘go down’.

Through its www.whichgreen.org campaign Ecotricity has castigated its competitors over their rates of investment in new renewable generation. Vince says they fail to make any effort to build new kit, while his company is working hard to put new turbines on Britain’s hillsides. No surprise that Ecotricity topped the table in the most recent WhichGreen assessment. It claimed that Vince and Co had been spending £431 per customer on new capacity. In second place was ScottishPower with just under £11.

That argument aside though, Ecotricity has made a virtue in the last few years of bringing its business clients ever closer to their source of energy though its company’s Merchant Wind Power programme, which builds new turbines on the end user’s property [see GF65, 'Fresh Energy'].

Vince thinks the time has come for corporate decision-makers to be rather more sophisticated about the green-brown energy question. “It’s not enough to simply tick the box marked ‘green’,” he says. “What is material is what you’re actually doing with your money.”

“People should be thinking about that bigger picture. When they do, I’ll be happy.” – Julian Rollins.

Ecotricity is a Forum for the Future partner.

21 September 2007

Julian Rollins