Try our Travel Carbon Calculator
Introducing our Travel Carbon Calculator
We all want to reduce our carbon impact on the planet, but it can be tricky to find simple, meaningful ways to do that.
Octopus customers have already taken the all-important step of signing up to 100% green electricity (and maybe even carbon-neutral gas if you are a Super Green customer).
But we want to make it even easier for you to be greener.
With our Travel Carbon Calculator, you can work out your carbon emissions from just traveling to work, to exploring the world, in a few clicks and offset it using our carbon credits. Try it out now.
Talking planely about flying
Your home's energy consumption accounts for around a fifth of your yearly carbon emissions – but that's nothing on flying.
A return flight from London to New York produces 2.78 tonnes of CO2. That's the same amount produced from an average home’s electricity use over two years (on standard, non-renewable power of course).
It's thankfully really easy to reduce your energy impact by switching to a green supplier. But cutting out flights is a much tougher sacrifice for most of us – whether you're travelling to see loved ones, to work, or explore the world.
We wanted to find an easier way to help our customers reduce the impact of those unavoidable flights and other forms of polluting transport. It's pretty easy to work out an estimate of the carbon emissions of a journey based on your travel time, and, we already work closely with a brilliant organisation, Renewable World, dedicated to running carbon offsetting projects around the world. So, we’re unlocking the opportunity for you to buy more carbon offsets, funding Renewable World's work, though your online account.
Read on to find out how it works.
Carbon Offsetting with Renewable World
Between 2018-2020 we offset over 272,408 tonnes of carbon with Renewable World.
Every year we buy carbon credits from Renewable World in order to offset the gas emissions of our Super Green customers (each credit is the equivalent offset of one tonne of carbon).
We love Renewable World as they carefully select projects that use renewable energy technologies to guarantee a reduction in carbon commissions, but also tackle poverty, promote energy independence and improve people’s health and wellbeing. Our flagship projects currently include investing in cleaner cookstoves, solar panels and biogas in communities without reliable access to clean, safe power.
Fuelling the green flights of the future
We know the world can't offset its way out of flying. We need to find ways to reduce, or completely eliminate the carbon emissions from air travel. That's why Octopus Hydrogen is providing 100% green hydrogen to help develop some of the world's first commercial hydrogen-electric planes.
Octopus Hydrogen will provide 100% green hydrogen to ZeroAvia’s R&D centre at Cotswold Airport in Kemble during the testing, certification and first commercial operations of its zero emission hydrogen-electric aircraft powertrain technology.
ZeroAvia plans to bring this powertrain technology to market by 2024, helping commercial zero-emission flights become a reality.
Sustainable ways of flying will be taking off in the not too distant future. For now, we hope you'll enjoy this Flight Carbon Calculator, making it easy to cut your carbon impact.
How do you work out my flights' carbon impact?
Ready for the nitty gritty detail?
Here are the assumptions we've used to calculate your flight emissions estimate. Remember for each tonne of carbon, we will match that with a carbon credit from Renewable World.
Flying carbon emissions are calculated from the BEIS ghg reporting factors.
To keep the calculator as easy to use as possible we have assumed the flight is economy, originating from the UK and the return flight is the same as the outbound flight.
We've also included a distance uplift of +8% to take into account planes not using the most direct routes, as is commonly the case. The factors applied also include indirect emissions which contribute to climate change e.g. water vapour, contrails, NOx.
Published on 5th October 2021 by:
Hey I'm Constantine, welcome to Octopus Energy!
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