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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

The fact they have Drax energy at 88% tells me they are counting the giant coal factory converted to burn the worlds forest as renewable, it definitely is not just because its biomass. They also have EDF energy, the nuclear power producer, very low tells us they are counting Nuclear as a none renewable. They aren't looking at temporal moves of energy either, which is a big part of Octopus energies customers who are solar and battery owners and do a lot of energy shifting for the grid. These three components mean the wrong companies are at the top and bottom. This index is useless as it stands its not about who is good for the environment and not.

The fundamental idea we need, but the implementation here is just terrible they aren't promoting the right things and it makes me wonder who is really behind this given the bad producers who have got themselves to near the top.

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Thanks for the feedback. You raise three important points that I'll address in turn:

1. Biomass: We report renewables as defined by Ofgem (the UK energy regulator), which for better or worse includes biomass. However, we recognise this is contentious. To address this, we show the breakdown of generating technologies for each supplier so users can see the composition. But regardless, your point is valid and has been raised several times this week, so we have a PR open to add a filter that lets viewers exclude biomass if they disagree with the UK's legal definition.

2. Nuclear: Our initial focus was on renewable power (where intermittency is highest), but we'll be adding nuclear to the index in the next few weeks. This will increase the scores for EDF, Octopus Energy, and British Gas in particular, who purchase the majority of nuclear power. We've called this out in various places on the index (e.g., on the EDF page: https://matched.energy/clean-power-index/edf-energy).

3. Load shifting: Because we measure generation and demand at a half-hourly level, we do account for load shifting that suppliers like Octopus incentivise through agile tariffs. This is actually one of the key advantages of our approach over historic annual accounting; the half hourly temporal granularity means we reward load shifting behaviour.

Instead of using obviously corrupt measures of sustainability (that have been intentionally broken and game-able for decades) why not calculate net CO2e?

(Or, better, add a toggle to the UI. That will highlight how broken carbon markets and regulatory classifications are.)

We're already exploring calculating supplier-level carbon intensities (CO2e), for which hourly matching is a necessary precursor. A toggle between matching score and CO2e rankings isn't a bad idea. Should have some updates in the coming weeks.

Is CO2e all that matters now for power to be “clean” or sustainable? Seems like that would leave out quite a bit of environmental impact, habitats destruction, air and water pollution, etc

> burn the worlds forest as renewable, it definitely is not just because its biomass

The world's forest is renewable. Maybe the rate of harvest is unsustainable. Maybe the forest is not being renewed for other reasons like the land is being used for grazing or development. But it is renewable.

Not necessarily. Take the dust bowl for example, or look at global desertification rates. We’re basically burning/eating topsoil. It’s beyond modern technology’s capabilities to manufacture/ replace topsoil, so it’s a non-renewable resource, just like coal.

The end result will still be that we'll have less forests to eat some portion of atmospheric CO2 and more CO2 because we burnt wood. What's important is what puts us in a good direction to fight climate change, and burning forests more than they replenish does not sound something that is it.

By that logic so is oil and gas no?

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