Where to start? My Dad always told me to turn off the lights and save money, well I guess we need to look at switching things off to reduce our emissions. And wouldn't it be great if it saved us money as well. I mean a lot of the media sells the benefits of going green on that basis; save money AND save the planet. I know it's a good way to incentivise people to act but doesn't it also just encourage the kind of rational economic thinking that says I'm only going to save the planet if it saves me money. What if it's going to cost me money, what will I do then?
Anyway, looking at our household energy consumption seemed as good a place as any to begin our emissions reduction project. And after a few hours spent poring over a years worth of utility bills and searching out current meter readings I can announce the results of my household fuel consumption survey. I don't know if they are particularly good or bad, but they're a benchmark, our starting point. Our average annual electricity consumption is 5364 KWh and for gas we eat up 27250KWh (well that does include cooking, heating and hot water). Just typing those figures in I already feel a little guilty (those numbers look so big) and hear excuses in my head justifying our consumption (well, we're a big family, it's a big house and it's winter time).
Anyway, they are the scores on the doors. Now we have to figure out what we spend it on and how to cut it down. In one of his newsletters The Carbon Coach suggests starting your journey to greendom by switching your energy supplier to a green one, one who commits to generate or purchase the energy you consume from renewable sources, ie sources that do not generate carbon emissions - like hydroelectric, wind, solar or wave energy.
So I looked up the options on uswitch where I learned that if I switched from my current supplier to the cheapest available option I could save over £275 a year on my bills. Or I could stay with my current supplier and switch to their green tariff and save £0 except my conscience. Or better still I could switch to the wholly green good energy supplier, pay them an extra £131 per year and know that my energy was 100% green guaranteed. Now there's a dilemma I suspect we will come up against time and time again; that the clean, green option may not be a money saver, in fact it may cost us money. And with a financial disincentive going green feels that little bit harder, especially when you think of what you could do with an extra £275 in your wallet. Still it would probably only lead to further consumption in one form or another so to start with we're going switch to the green tariff with our existing supplier; I'm not ready to pay extra yet. And as for savings, we will be saving something like 1500kg of CO2 emissions annually.
What you never had you'll never miss, or so my mum always told me and I guess that will be true of the £275 savings I am not making. What worries us about the changes we may have to make in pursuit of reducing emissions is that we may end up missing things we do have.
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