What do Ecotricity stand for?
At Ecotricity, our mission is to end fossil fuels. As an energy company, the best way we can do this is by giving people an alternative – green energy.
How does Ecotricity fight climate change?
Ecotricity was the first energy company to offer its customers green electricity. We started with one windmill in Gloucestershire and have carried on building new wind and solar parks around Britain. Whenever a business switches to Ecotricity for their electricity, they stop using fossil fuel and start using green energy.
Other energy companies have followed our lead, and today around 40% of the energy used in the UK comes from green sources. But there’s still a long way to go, and there are still fossil fuel power stations across the country, coughing carbon dioxide into the air and increasing the effects of climate change. We aim to stop that by using our profits to build more wind and solar parks as we grow, as well as developing important infrastructure like grid scale battery storage.
We’ve built 74 windmills so far and we’re now building solar parks as well (we even have Britain’s biggest solar park in planning). In many ways, our sun parks are the perfect companions to our wind parks – on average, it’s windier at night and during the winter, while sunmills generate more electricity as the days lengthen.
How can green gas replace fossil fuels?
Across the UK, we still heat our homes and businesses using fossil fuels – mainly natural gas. A small proportion of the gas Ecotricity supply today is already green gas from sustainable sources. The rest is carbon neutralised gas – we invest in carbon reduction programmes to cancel out the carbon emitted when the gas is burned.
This isn’t our ideal solution. Green gas made from grass is the best way forward, and we’re busy building our first green gas mill right now to show how much better it is than switching the entire country to heat pumps.
A recent Green Gas Report from Imperial College London Consultants reveals that a national Green Gas programme could:
- Replace natural gas in the grid with green gas made from grass cuttings. When the grass grows back, it absorbs the carbon dioxide created by burning green gas. Then we cut the grass and make more green gas, and the sustainable cycle repeats itself.
- Power every home and business in Britain if meat production was reduced by a small amount, and that land was used to grow grass – this is easily in line with historical farming trends.
- Slash greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 90% compared to the current use of North Sea gas and synthetic fertilisers. Green gas mills produce a natural fertiliser as a by-product.
- Create 160,000 jobs in the rural economy.
- Provide a better home for nature.
What is our vision?
We’ve come a long way. Every new customer who joins Ecotricity reduces the amount of fossil fuel burned to produce electricity.
By joining Ecotricity, you’re helping us make that happen. We’ll invest the money from your bills in building new wind, sun and green gas mills to fight the climate crisis.
