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.

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.

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.

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.