A new calculator and a surprise

I’ve just got round to signing up to Torchbox’s carbon calculator – The Carbon Account. It’s quite the best I’ve used for a number of reasons. It logs detailed information about your particular vehicles and your energy supplier, looks up the latest information on them and presents your progress to reducing your carbon footprint in a really clear, evolving display. The result was higher than I expected (3.57 tonnes) but the reason for this turned out to be rather shocking.

The Carbon account uses information on the fuel mix used by the different energy suppliers from here. We were with Good Energy and they show up as using 100% renewable sources. But we switched to Ecotricity precisely because we were told that they were more truly green. But based on this information, they in fact only source 24% from renewables – with the same percentage coming from coal.

So what’s this about? Going Ecotricity’s web site, I can’t find any reference to their fuel mix. Instead they make great play with the fact that they are the largest investors in new renewables. But is this really the point? And should we switch back to Good Energy?