The fundamental idea we need, but the implementation here is just terrible they aren't promoting the right things and it makes me wonder who is really behind this given the bad producers who have got themselves to near the top.
The world's forest is renewable. Maybe the rate of harvest is unsustainable. Maybe the forest is not being renewed for other reasons like the land is being used for grazing or development. But it is renewable.
It's an artifact of stuff like carbon credits. Companies like apple, google, and amazon declare that they are carbon neutral, or will be by some date, and what they actually do is burn a lot of fossil fuel but "offset" it by paying for carbon credits.
It feels wrong somehow to be trying to turn them into a perfect way for committed individuals to opt into paying the full price for their individual contribution to only one aspect of the problem.
Instead we should perhaps take a step back and try to assign the costs of the whole system to everyone, regardless of whether they want to volunteer to pay more to make things happen faster.
It interacts poorly with EV or heat pump adoption where volunteering to pay for the last 5% of green electricity could tip the balance against those purchases. But buying them would lower your carbon footprint at even much lower percentage of clean electricity.
Are green conscious consumers ready for the complexity of paying for 95% clean energy?
A similar index for Australian power would be pretty useful.
1. Biomass: We report renewables as defined by Ofgem (the UK energy regulator), which for better or worse includes biomass. However, we recognise this is contentious. To address this, we show the breakdown of generating technologies for each supplier so users can see the composition. But regardless, your point is valid and has been raised several times this week, so we have a PR open to add a filter that lets viewers exclude biomass if they disagree with the UK's legal definition.
2. Nuclear: Our initial focus was on renewable power (where intermittency is highest), but we'll be adding nuclear to the index in the next few weeks. This will increase the scores for EDF, Octopus Energy, and British Gas in particular, who purchase the majority of nuclear power. We've called this out in various places on the index (e.g., on the EDF page: https://matched.energy/clean-power-index/edf-energy).
3. Load shifting: Because we measure generation and demand at a half-hourly level, we do account for load shifting that suppliers like Octopus incentivise through agile tariffs. This is actually one of the key advantages of our approach over historic annual accounting; the half hourly temporal granularity means we reward load shifting behaviour.
Set the price to be 2x the cost of direct air carbon capture, then put the money in a fund that pays for cheapest environmentally responsible capture first.
This would lead to ev’s and heat pumps being drastically cheaper than older technologies.
While they’re at it, federalize the price gouging oil companies. We have signs at gas stations run by international megacorps here in California complaining that we have the highest fuel taxes in the US. The taxes are listed on the pumps, by law.
If you subtract them out, and compare the results to other states, you’ll find that we’re being price gouged dollars per gallon by the industries.
(The excuse for this is that there was months-long supply chain shock 20+ years ago. Of course, the prices never went down after that shock…)
Anyway, screw them. We have EVs now, and as bad as PG&E’s rates are, it’s still saving us hundreds of dollars a month.
What we've tried to do at Matched is make this fact visible, showing which suppliers actually deliver clean power hour by hour rather than just on paper. A number of suppliers (notably Good Energy and Octopus) perform surprisingly well, be procuring renewable power that aligns well with their consumer's demand.
The amount of open data that's available in the UK is laudable and makes our analysis possible. But we do have some theories about how we can expand to other countries. Australia will be an interesting one, given renewable penetration.
(Or, better, add a toggle to the UI. That will highlight how broken carbon markets and regulatory classifications are.)
Many British consumers pay for 100% renewable electricity. But how much are they actually getting?
The power sector has a dedicated system to track the generation and consumption of renewable power, and suppliers use it to back their green energy claims. But there's a problem. The rules allow suppliers to claim that summer power from solar farms is being used to cover winter evening power that came from gas plants. Your heating at 6pm in January? Almost certainly powered by fossil fuels, no matter what your tariff says.
This isn't fraud. Suppliers are following rules set over 20 years ago, back in 2003, when renewables generated less than 3% of Britain's electricity. But renewables now regularly provide more than half our power, varying between 5% and 80% depending on weather and season. The old system hasn't kept pace.
We've set out to fix this, with the newly published Matched Clean Power Index.
The data to calculate what types of energy consumers actually get already exists. The National Energy System Operator tracks renewable generation, Ofgem tracks who buys it, Elexon records supply and demand. We've combined these public sources to show how well renewable supply aligns with customer demand, hour by hour.
Here's what that reveals. When a solar farm generates power on a summer afternoon, that electricity flows to whoever's consuming at that moment—likely customers of multiple suppliers across the grid. But that solar power can be claimed by a single supplier, and used to offset the gas-generated electricity they serve their customers on winter evenings. The system currently trades in paper claims, not physical delivery.
The results reveal stark differences. Good Energy is 88% renewable. Octopus manages 69% across a huge portfolio that is nearly 30 TWh. Check what you're getting - we see electricity branded as 100% renewable that is actually only 55%.
We developed the methodology with over 30 energy sector experts, including those at Imperial College London, Oxford University, and Princeton. We worked with suppliers including npower, Good Energy, and So Energy. We've benefited greatly from collaborations with leading hourly matching organisations like Granular Energy and EnergyTag, and with others across the sector who are eager to see the system improved. The full methodology is published at matched.energy/methodology. Anyone can verify our calculations.
Visit the Index to see how your supplier performs.
Consumers can make better choices. Leading suppliers can demonstrate what they're already doing well. And we all get clearer sight of where the system needs to improve.
Britain is aiming for Clean Power by 2030. Getting there affordably means reducing our reliance on gas. We can do this by directing investment to renewable generation, storage, and flexibility that actually matches when we use electricity, particularly those hard-to-reach hours. Not just claiming cheap summer renewables to cover expensive winter gas.
The Matched Clean Power Index shows that it's possible to align renewable generation with consumption - several suppliers are already doing it.
Our work is only just beginning. Our priorities are:
If you have any feedback or want to talk about using Matched's data, please get in touch.