What makes Octopus Energy so very green?

So just how green is Octopus Energy?

Well, for starters, the Renewable Energy Association have given us their award for ‘the company that's done the most to advance UK renewables’ for the last two years running.

Given that we’ve been leading the charge, it’s great to see that renewable tariffs are now becoming more affordable, and more large suppliers are starting to offer green electricity as standard. These changes signal a real advancement for UK energy, as we work to fight the climate crisis. But along with the companies and people that are trying to do good by the planet, there’s also some who ‘greenwash’ – sowing of seeds of confusion to make themselves seem greener than they really are.

We can proudly say that Octopus Energy has no part in that. We’re supplying 100% green electricity to customers now, and investing in new renewable generation. It's important to understand that when you join a renewable supplier, there isn't a special 'green grid' that sends renewable-only generated energy to your home. We ensure that we are 100% green by making sure that for every electron we supply from the grid, we invest in the generation of another 'green' electron to take its place. On top of this, we’re also using radical technologies to drive system-wide change and end the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels once and for all!

Let’s explore some of the many, meaningful ways that Octopus Energy is supporting a green future, today.

Octopus Energy Generation and large-scale investment in green energy.

In 2021, we acquired our sister company Octopus Renewables, making us one of Europe’s largest investors and operators of renewable energy.

Octopus Energy Generation now manages a portfolio of almost 2 terawatt hours of energy each year, mostly from solar power, but also wind, and a bit of biomass.

What exactly does it mean that we operate renewable energy? And what’s the difference between our massive investment in green energy, and the way other green (sometimes called ‘deep green’) suppliers generate energy?

It’s important to understand that currently, no matter what supplier you use, your home won’t actually run on 100% green electrons. All energy types travel through the same wires via the UK’s grid, and there’s no way to send solar, wind and hydro electrons down a renewable-only highway to your home.

When you use a ‘deep green’ supplier, they buy the amount of green energy you require from a renewable generator and pump it into the grid. The electricity sent through the grid to your house actually still comes from the same pool of clean and dirty energy as everybody else’s. This means you’re investing in green energy generation, increasing the amount of renewables in that overall ‘pool’ of energy.

In our case, Octopus Energy Generation sends almost 2TWh of green energy each year to the market. Practically speaking, Octopus Energy also needs to be able to supply our customers with reliable, consistent energy when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, so we get a portion of our energy via Octopus Energy Generation (and other community generators), and we also get energy from the open market alongside renewable energy ‘REGO’ certificates. On top of Octopus Energy Generation, these certificates also go directly to supporting UK renewable energy generation – an injection of millions every year into renewable generation, over and above the cost of standard ‘mixed-bag’ electrons from the open market.

In short, Octopus is generating and sharing green energy with the grid (on a small and large scale), supplying renewable energy to our customers, and also investing in green generators through REGOs.

If you’re interested, you can read more about where our energy comes from in our dedicated generators blog.

Supporting direct renewable generation and encouraging new independent generators to market

We’re big supporters of direct energy generation and are in the process of massively ramping up our ‘community energy’ portfolio. This involves purchasing energy from small-scale renewable generators and encouraging new ones to market. So far, we’ve teamed up with more than 93 renewable generators around the country to provide over 110 gigawatt hours of sun, wind and hydro power to our customers.

As part of our mission to nurture local, small-scale renewable energy generation, we're working with Energy Local, Ripple Energy, and have set up our own company dedicated to supporting and expanding home grown community based renewables - Co-operative Community Energy. We're forever forging links with an increasing number of generators. If you want to read more about our community energy project, you can read more about it in this blog.

Here's one of the small hydropower operations we've partnered with since August 1st this year – Llangattock Green Valleys

These sort of agreements (called Power Purchase Agreements) offer the kind of transparent supply chain we're keen to work towards. Our energy-buying money goes directly to the generators themselves, helping to grow the industry that will (soon, hopefully) power the whole UK with green energy.

Buying local is so important – we know that. It makes for a more efficient system, ultimately saving consumers money and strengthening small green businesses to boost local economies. It also allows for all sorts of innovative and experimental setups. Our recent partnership with Ripple Energy is a great example. We're working with them to supply customers with energy from their own community-owned wind farm! The more support we can give to small generators, the more new ones will pop up in the market, and the UK’s energy grid will become less and less reliant on fossil fuels.

So that’s how we’re investing in renewable generation from a massive-scale down to a community scale. We also want to empower individual people to generate their own energy – saving money and carbon, and making the grid greener.

We were the UK's first energy company to offer a smart way to pay people for solar micro-generation, and we're currently the only supplier that enables businesses to do the same

Renewable generation big AND small is so important to creating a green, decentralised energy grid. We want to empower customers to generate their own renewable energy through home solar PV, and we think it’s only fair for them to reap the rewards too.

Enter the world of the ‘export tariff’, an energy tariff that pays you for the renewable energy you generate at home and export to the grid. These tariffs encourage consumers to generate their own solar energy – by actually directly giving them the profits. Cheap energy for the people, and a greener grid for the UK at large.

Up until March 31st 2019, the government offered what’s called a ‘Feed-in tariff’ to do just this. Over 800,000 UK homes were generating their own solar power and getting paid for what they exported to the grid, but the programme ended, leaving no incentive for people to install solar panels and start sharing their power with the grid.

Thanks to our custom tech, we were able to launch an alternative to the Feed-in tariff - outgoingOctopus, months ahead of the rest of the industry, making sure that customers generating the greenest energy could get paid for it. Since then, we've been paying customers on our export tariff for their surplus green energy, helping the UK move, bit by bit, towards a cleaner grid. And outgoing goes further, offering a dynamic price for the energy that changes half-hourly based on the market value of energy at that time – meaning you get paid more for sharing green energy with the grid at times when it’s most in demand.

What’s more, as of February 2020, we’re also the first energy company to enable businesses to get paid for the green energy they generate. Panel Power, a combined import and export tariff, incentivises businesses to generate their own renewables, and is unlike any other business energy tariff that currently exists.

This kind of dynamic pricing has MASSIVE implications for how we’ll use energy in the future.

We invest heavily in cutting-edge technologies to form the building blocks of a low-carbon smart grid

Put simply: When working towards a net-zero economy, investment in renewable energy generation alone won’t cut it. We need to ensure we can ‘smooth’ the gaps in intermittent green energy generation (when the wind isn’t blowing, and the sun isn’t shining), and make the most of the green generation we already have. This involves ‘balancing’ the electrical grid, counteracting daily peaks in energy demand, between 4-7pm, when the grid gets overloaded and we are forced to rely on dirty fossil fuels.

Here, Octopus shines. We are leading the industry when it comes to developing a better balanced, fully automated, environmentally friendly, smart grid – the only way we can move to a net zero economy any time soon. Our tech-led approach has allowed us to develop tariffs and tech products that encourage a shift in consumer behaviour, spreading consumption throughout the day, and smoothing out those carbon intensive ‘peaks’.

We're pioneering innovations like Vehicle2Grid charging, which encourages Electric Vehicle owners to charge up on cheaper, greener energy overnight, drive around all day, and then discharge their batteries after work (in exchange for payment), to help balance the grid.

In the meantime, we're also running experiments to help us balance the grid and make the most of renewable energy in future, like our ‘Big Switch On’, where we trialed paying customers to use up energy on a day where there was due to be excess renewable energy in the grid!

We’re behind the UK’s first dynamically-priced smart electricity tariff – agileOctopus.

Dynamic energy pricing is laying the groundwork for a vastly different energy system. As Reuters put it:

With agile, and other smart tariffs like it, we’re experimenting to see if consumer habits can be changed when there are financial incentives to make the most of perfectly good green energy, when it might otherwise go to waste.

There’s really nothing else like agile in the market today. The tariff was even named Digital Project of the Year at last years’ BusinessGreen Leaders Awards –

A collective shift to using energy in off-peak hours would mean a cleaner, greener energy system. Obviously no one wants to get up at 3am to turn the dryer on when electricity is super cheap. So we’re also working on innovative automations and integrations so customers get the benefits of dynamic pricing without having to lift a finger, pairing up with everything from Amazon’s Alexa to IFTTT.

Whether it’s smart plugs , or smart chargers, or smart home apps – your appliances can be triggered to turn on based on how much green energy is on the grid, and how cheap it is for you, while you sleep.

We’re encouraging customers and other smart home/IoT innovators to automate with Agile via our public API, meaning the daily pricing data is freely available for anyone to play around with and hook up to neat new product integrations. We even have a full time ‘Future Technologies Evangelist’, Phil Steele, who works day and night on ways to build an energy efficient, Net Zero smart home. Check out what Phil’s been up to on our blog.

We're driving renewable research with the establishment of the Future Energy Research Centre

We are particularly excited to announce the establishing of our Future Energy Research Centre, funded by our investment from Origin Energy. At the research centre, we'll bring together climate experts, data scientists, economists and policy specialists to devise plans and models to make net zero faster and more affordable. Octopus Energy will freely contribute our data and technology expertise to give these experts unique insight into how customers, networks and grids can come together for a faster, more affordable transition to 100% renewable energy.

We plant hundreds of thousands of trees, and fund Renewable World’s green energy projects in fuel-poor communities around the globe.

There are some emissions we’re not able to avoid completely, whether it’s from non-green transportation or our customers’ gas usage for things like heating and cooking. For now, for a few ££ extra on your bill per month, we’ll offset any carbon emissions from the gas used in your home. We do this in a few ways, which you can read about in depth here.

We’re funding projects to bring cheaper, greener energy to fuel-poor communities around the world with the help of our partner Renewable World.

Renewable World bring low-carbon technologies to areas with limited access to safe, reliable energy. It might mean installing solar lighting in a Kenyan fishing community that previously relied on dangerous, highly polluting kerosene lamps to do business. Or replacing a small town’s unreliable diesel generators with a solar micro-grid, empowering the community with access to energy that doesn’t cost the earth.

The solutions Renewable World provides aren’t a one-size-fits-all. They are customised to have the most impact in the particular community, and they’re set up with the community’s help. As well as massively reducing carbon footprints by providing an alternative to fossil fuel power, RW’s projects empower local people to truly make the most of the new tech, enabling the creation of new businesses to boost the local economy.

We plant trees across the UK

In 2017, we launched a UK-wide community tree planting programme, working with schools and community spaces nominated by our customers to raise awareness for air pollution, increase biodiversity, and soak up carbon dioxide.

The first year, we planted 1,000 trees. In 2018, we planted 10,000. This year, we’re going bigger still – far bigger – in an effort to offset some of the carbon emissions we’re generating as a business as well as our customers’ emissions. Watch this space.