Which is the best supplier to choose if you want to encourage the development of renewable energy sources?
Friends of the Earth‘s recommendations for green electricity tariffs are:
- Northern Ireland Electricity‘s EcoEnergy tariff — Northern Ireland only.
- Ecotricity Old Energy tariff — not available anymore. (Their current New Energy tariff is not recommended.)
- Good Energy — but there have been bad reports in the press about billing problems and poor customer service.
- Green Energy 100. This looks like a good option environmentally, but is a good deal more expensive than the competition, although you get shares in the company which may or may not compensate. Disappointingly for a firm which trades on its green credentials, you can’t apply online: you have to print out forms onto paper and send them by snail mail — thus contributing a little more CO2 to the atmosphere needlessly!
So, in the end, I’ve skipped all of these and gone for Juice, which is NPower’s offering in collaboration with Greenpeace. It seems a reasonably good tariff environmentally, providing 100% demand from renewables. There are reasons why FoE prefers Green Energy 100, but Juice is considerably cheaper and I’m not sure their reasons are compelling enough to override that (or maybe I just haven’t understood them).
I’m a little wary of getting in bed with NPower who have been one of the main culprits of dodgy high-pressure doorstep sales tactics in the past, but that was carried out by a subcontractor and doesn’t necessarily reflect on their in-house customer service… we’ll see.