Renewable energy

[peter scott]

I've been with Bulb for two years now and can certainly recommend them. Prices are reasonable and they are good to deal with. I didn't want smart metering and they were perfectly happy to let me continue in the stone age without pestering me further.

Peter

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Im with Bulb too, I was previously with OVO. I cannot though see how any company can say that they supply only 100% green energy!
The national grid is connected to all sorts here, nuclear, wind, biomass, gas and who knows what else. I dont see a separate cable running to a windfarm from my home.

I raised up the generator today by nearly another metre, this has made a big difference, nearly a steady charge now and the wind speed and direction virtually the same as yesterday. Where it does fall down is the charge controller it seems inefficient. Even with the blades flying round it was struggling to give two amps and the controller was getting warm. So I made up a three phase bridge rectifier with 6 high current shottkey diodes and this more than tripled the charge current, the diodes remained cool. The downside is of course there is now no overspeed protection or overcharge protection, it shouldn't be an issue to make up a suitable circuit for that though.

[ppppenguin]

Green electricity comes in various shades. All explained here: https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/home-en...lectricity

There's a lot of greenwash about.

Green gas is mostly a fiction. There's very little truly green gas on the network. I haven't found a figure but I'm pretty sure it's well under 10%. Unlike electricity where over 30% is currently coming from renewables and over half from low carbon (includes nuclear) and virtually none from coal. This is an annual average and it's only getting better. As we build more large scale wind projects whch are the main source of renewables in the UK we will need more storage but that's getting better too. This wikipedia article covers the field pretty well but I don't think it addresses the rapid rate at which grid scale storage is expanding. There's also distributed storage such as V2G which is set for rapid growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

Incidentally, a number of London bus routes are now all-electric with many more headed that way as existing buses reach the end of their service life.

Best I could find on green gas: https://www.greengas.org.uk/green-gas

[Nick]

Bulb state that for every kWh that is supplied to one of their customers, they put a kWh of 100% green/renewable electricity onto the grid.

It's patently not realistic to get guaranteed green electrons down your feed - that's simply not the way the national grid works, and it doesn't reduce the validity Bulb's claim that they supply 100% renewable electricity.

[ppppenguin]

Unless I've overlooked something Bulb don't state on their website what fraction of their electricity is bought from renewable generators and how much is in the form of Renewable Obligation Certificates (REGO).

For example https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/our-energy/ say: "We buy our 100% renewable electricity from over 1,600 independent generators. From local farms to sustainable businesses that generate their own power and sell us the excess. " This makes them as green as it's possible to get. Bulb don't make that claim so some fraction of their supply is likely to be REGO. This isn't a huge criticism of Bulb who are certainly buying some of their renewables directly. Some so-called green tariffs are purely REGO based.

[Nick]

On Bulb's home page it's pretty clear:

We provide our members with 100% renewable electricity from solar, wind and hydro. ...

We buy our energy from renewable generators across the UK. Wherever possible, we have direct relationships with these generators to purchase their electricity. We buy the rest from the wholesale market. We source our electricity from wind, solar and hydro, and work with generators of all different sizes, from small-scale sites like Tyn y Cornel Hydro in Snowdonia to large-scale off-shore wind farms.

also

... we buy electricity on the wholesale market and a renewable energy certificate to match. Every unit of electricity we supply can be traced back to a renewable source.

I'm not at all sure why using ROCs to guarantee that a source of electricity is renewable is any less "green" than having a direct relationship. OfGen would be all over them if they made a false claim.

Bulb now have 1.5 million customers - 5% of the UK domestic market.

[ppppenguin]

I'm not at all sure why using ROCs to guarantee that a source of electricity is renewable is any less "green" than having a direct relationship. OfGen would be all over them if they made a false claim.

Explained here:
https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/home-en...lectricity

[Nick]

I'm not at all sure why using ROCs to guarantee that a source of electricity is renewable is any less "green" than having a direct relationship. OfGen would be all over them if they made a false claim.

Explained here:
https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/home-en...lectricity

It was a rhetorical question - I too can use Google - the point is clearly made in the second quote I posted from Bulb's site:

Every unit of electricity we supply can be traced back to a renewable source.

[ppppenguin]

I can use Google too - the point is clearly made in the second quote I posted from Bulb's site:

Every unit of electricity we supply can be traced back to a renewable source.

With all due respect, that statement is somewhat ambiguous. A certificate is equally traceable.

I'm not trying to say that Bulb are a bad company - their green credentials are far better than most - but unless they unambiguously state that they buy all their electricity from green sources then they may or may not be using certificates. As it says on the Energy Saving Trust website:

We’ve identified the following suppliers who all clearly list the renewable sources of their energy on their websites. We think these tariffs are as green as they get. Other suppliers may meet the same standard of sourcing direct from UK renewable energy generators but we couldn’t identify this from their websites at the time of our investigation.

I realise this may be splitting hairs, but if a supplier is sourcing all its electricity from renewable generation and not using certificates then this is something they can boast about.

[Nick]

Again:

...we buy electricity on the wholesale market and a renewable energy certificate to match

The key word here is "match". Yes, you could split hairs and argue that it might not be the same kWh, i.e. from the same supplier, but that would most certainly be misleading and OfGen, who are not afraid of fining suppliers, would be on that in a flash.

We're going in circles here.