Electricity smart meters

The age of the smart meter has arrived.

In a big push for the energy industry which will eventualy see all households smart metered, these new electronic devices are being rolled out a fast pace, giving the consumer the chance to do all kinds of things that would previously have been difficult or impossible:

– plan your energy use
– set savings targets
– keep a record of energy savings
– set warnings for when electricity consumption is too high

Electricity suppliers UK wide now have these devices on offer – have a look and see what they could do for you.

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Renewables – intro to PV cells

Some good basic info on this photovoltaics intro video, for us non-boffins:

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not all subsidies are under the cosh: repeat: not all subsidies are under the cosh

Whew, some pretty good news in the shape of this BBC report stating that electric car subsidies aren’t going to be cancelled by the coalition. What with all the shearing, scything, chopping, axeing, munching, crunching and general 86ing of quangoes budgets and whatnot, this is almost miraculous.

What the electric car subsidy means to the consumer is that as of January 2011, peole who buy a plug-in car will get up to five grand in discount. The grants will continue til March the following year so long as the (finite, obvs!) budget doesn’t run out.

Some electric car linkage for your perusal:

Nissan Leaf

Wikipedia page on electric cars

Mitsubishi electric cars

Green Car site

Tesla Motors

And don’t worry folks, the electric car has moved on a bit since this:

All we need now is cheap electricity.

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Invaluable Advice from the Energy Retail Association (ERA)

If truth be told there are a number of these consumer representative organisations out there – all undertaking extremely worthy work and research in order to keep the energy firms on their toes and save us a bit of cash on our cheaper gas and electrcity bills. However, by far the most comprehensive and sensible of these websites that we have seen is that of the Energy Retail Association (ERA).

Their website contains a wealth of information covering the entire gamut of the energy retail experience. Amongst the topics covered are:

• Energy supply complaints – how to deal with them
• Helping customers with energy efficiency – what does all the jargon mean? (Atlantic have a cheaper gas and electricity page on this)
• Services for vulnerable customers – don’t worry help is at hand, you just need to know where to look!
• New code of practice for customer billing
• Preventing disconnection
• Switching Supplier – the quickets and easiest methods
• New technology – Smart meters
• Independent code for doorstep sales practice

All of the information is presented in a very easy to read manner – we were impressed. ERA also undertake research into all aspects of the UK energy insustry. Their recent findings include that 32% of UK households are not even aware of the existence of the smart metering programme.

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Energy Bills Warning As Fixed Rates Deal Ends

As you have probably read in your newspaper today, OFGEM is warning UK consumers that they should be seriously considering switching energy suppliers in the next few months. This is because the popular fixed price energy tariffs offered by some of the biggest energy suppliers are coming to an end in August. Many people signed up for these in the last couple of years in order to protect themselves from rising energy bills, Moneysupermarket.com has said that 70% of customers switched to these types of deals last year.

OFGEM warns that unles consumers switch now they could face a rises of over £300 in their annual energy bills.

This is obviously concerning news for all UK energy consumers out there. In the current economic climate the last thing that households need to hear is that their energy bills are going to increase no matter what. We can but hope that the end of this fixed price regime will perhaps spark some new initiatives amongst some of the biggest energy suppliers and the anticipated rises won’t hit consumers as hard as predicted.

Please fill out our poll on this matter.

Read more on this story from these sources:

MSN Money – “Energy customers could face £340 bill hike”

FT.com – “Household bills to rise as fixed energy deals end”

Mirror.co.uk – “Household bills to soar as fixed-rate power deal ends”

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UK Consumers: Who owns your energy?

Understandably, as consumers we are very much focused on getting the cheapest gas and electricity bills that we can. There are very few of us that actually give any thought to the ‘bigger picture’ of who we are actually paying to supply our energy. This is a particular issue in these difficult economic times – anything that can lower our household bills is welcome.

With this in mind, we felt that it would be useful to compile a list of the current ‘big six’ energy suppliers in the UK, with details on who really controls these companies.

• E.ON – Based in Dusseldorf, Germany, completed take over of Powergen in 2002.
• EDF (Électricité de France) – Paris based, produced 22% of EU Electricity in 2003, 74.5% of which was from Nuclear Power.
• NPower – It’s parent comapny is german giant RWE
• Scottish Power – Controlled by Iberdola, a huge Spanish Utilities company
• British Gas – Centrica ltd took over the British Gas name in the UK
• Scottish and Southern Energy – Based in Perth, Scotland since its inception in 1998

So, there we are – as you can see there are some rather intersting results in there. If you get your power from E.ON, EDF, NPower or Scottish Power, you are essentially further swelling the coffers of some of the biggest utilities companies in Europe. British Gas parent company Centrica is at least UK based, but has significant interests in Europe and North America – how can we be sure that our money is being re-invested in improving their UK energy supply?.

Scottish and Southern Energy, established in 1998 with the merger of  Scottish Hydro and Southern Electric is the second largest supplier of natural gas and electricity in the UK. It’s headquarters are in Perth, Scotland.

Of course, all of these companies are in the energy business to make money from us, no matter where they are based. However, surely we should be more concsious of who we are paying for our energy in the future.

Who controls the big six energy companies?

Discuss this with us on the Nature network.

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Follow the Green Energy Sector on Twitter

Green Energy on Twitter

‘Micro blogging’ website Twitter has exploded in popularity over the past year. The energy sector is well represented, principally with green thinkers all sharing ideas and opinions. It seems however, that many major energy companies are still trying to grasp how to deal with this phenomenon – only a few are represented.

We thought that it would be useful to highlight some of the main green energy Twitter pages.

Firstly (of course) – you can follow our ramblings here:  http://twitter.com/BleedingGreenUK – we look forward to hearing from you.

Companies and organisations

• Freinds of the Earth – http://twitter.com/wwwfoecouk
• Atlantic cheap gas and electricity forum – http://twitter.com/AtlanticForum
• http://twitter.com/OurWorld20
• Greenpeace – http://twitter.com/Greenpeace
• http://twitter.com/FordDriveGreen
• http://twitter.com/ecotouch
• http://twitter.com/Greenpreneur

Green voices

• http://twitter.com/greenmeme
• http://twitter.com/GoGreenEnergy
• http://twitter.com/greenlivingblog
• http://twitter.com/ecoshare
• http://twitter.com/ecoseek
• http://twitter.com/TheSimpleGreen
• http://twitter.com/TheGreenNag
• http://twitter.com/GreenPosting
• http://twitter.com/guardianeco – The Guardian Eco Section Twitter
• http://twitter.com/current_green
• http://twitter.com/ecosection
• http://twitter.com/GreenEnergyBrf
• http://twitter.com/thegreeneconomy
• http://twitter.com/ecobeautiful

Useful

• http://twitter.com/metoffice – Met Office Twitter
• http://twitter.com/bestgreensites
• http://twitter.com/BarackObama

This is only a select few of the ‘green’ related Twitter users out there that we follow oursleves, there are literally thousands more. For anyone out there that hasn’y signed up yet, we highly reccommend it as it is a great source of news and opinion. If there are any Twitter pages related to the energy sector that you feel that we should be following then let us know.

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Hydro Power – How does it work?

There are some great sources of learning on the internet for those of us who wish to fully understand how green energy technologies actually work. We thought that it would be useful to focus on different technology in the coming weeks.

Today – hydro power and how this method generates electricity.

• The HowStuffWorks page is also a great resource on Hydro power.
• Although it obviously has a US slant Scientific American published a great article in March 2009 entitled ‘Time to Think Hydropower‘ – well worth a read.

If there anre any other great hydro recources out there, then please let us know.

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UN Report Highlights Rising Green Energy Investment

 

Green Energy bucks economic downturn

Despite the continuing economic downturn, global investment in green energy has increased significantly over the past year and overtaken fossil fuel investment. This rather surpirsing fact comes from the ‘Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009’ report which was prepared for the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative by global information provider New Energy Finance.

According to these statistics, 2008 clean energy investment topped the record levels of investment in 2007 by 5%.  This has been largely attributed to the significant green investments from the emerging economies of China and Brazil – investments in the US and Europe fell and were more conservative respectively.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said in the accompanying press release:

“Without doubt the economic crisis has taken its toll on investments in clean energy when set against the record-breaking growth of recent years. Investment in the United States fell by two per cent and in Europe growth was very much muted. However, there were also some bright points in 2008 especially in developing economies—China became the world’s second largest wind market in terms of new capacity and the world’s biggest photovoltaic manufacturer and a rise in geothermal energy may be getting underway in countries from Australia to Japan and Kenya”.

$155 billion in total was invested in 2008 in clean energy firms and projects worldwide (excluding large hydro projects). $105 billion dollars of this was spent directly developing power generating capacity from wind, solar, small-hydro, biomass and geothermal sources.

These are encouraging statistics, however we would sound a note of caution. The effects of the economic dowturn didn’t really begin to hit home until the fourth quarter of 2008, so here at Green Electricty we would (sadly) be extremely surprised if this level of investment continued in 2009.

Download the full ‘Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009’ report here.

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Smart Metering in all UK homes by 2020

The UK government announced yesterday that they have passed the necessary legislation for the use of ‘smart meters’ in every UK home by 2020. What is so revolutionary about this move is that it will allow consumers to take control of their own energy usage, and put an end to estimated bills.

This has been a development that we have been waiting for a number years to happen. Withintegrated we services such as the Google PowerMeter running concurrently to your smart meter, the future looks bright for those of us interested in finding out exactly how much power we are using. PowerMeter will essentially take the data from your meter and feed it directly into your iGoogle account giving you access to your home energy usage wherever and whenever you want. Although 2020 seems like a long time to wait for this technology to be available in every home, it should definitely be worth the wait.

How domestic energy usage will change in light of this technology is going to be interesting. What do you think will happen? – Let us know your thoughts………

Smart Meters like this will soon be ubiqutous

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