Hackney Friends of the Earth champion Clean British Energy

Make the UK energy independent and earn yourself a CBE, says Hackney Friends of the Earth

We’re pleased to be able to announce that Friends of the Earth are now awarding CBEs.

We realise that with the Jubilee and the Olympics people are feeling a bit prouder than usual of being British, so we wanted to honour the people who give the most back to their community; those who really support the sustainability of local communities, treasure our natural environment, try to take the load off the shoulders of future generations and help to support British businesses and British jobs.

You don’t even have to get David Cameron to approve it; you could become a CBE today. All you have to do it switch to Clean British Energy — CBE.

The new phase of Friends of the Earth’s energy campaigning is looking in detail at the energy companies in the UK, and whether or not they’re helping us to move towards the low carbon, local and decentralising energy that this country needs.

The Committee on Climate Change — the Government’s independent advisors on climate change — has recommended that we decarbonise our electricity system by 2030.

So what are our big energy companies doing for green energy? Not much, unfortunately. Overall, only 8% of the so-called Big Six’s capacity is renewable (the Big Six are British Gas, EDF energy, E.ON, Npower, Scottish Power and SSE).

Scottish Power and SSE lead the way with around 20% of their own energy generation capacity coming from renewables. The other four manage an average of only 2.6% renewable energy generation.

A mere 1% of EDF Energy’s generation is renewable, yet they’ve launched a ‘Green Britain Day’ as London 2012 Sustainability Partner. E.ON’s ‘Go Green’ tariff includes a staggeringly low 0.03% renewable energy.

The Big Six’s dependence on fossil fuels means two things for the UK. Firstly, your bills are constantly going up: between 2000 and 2010, in real terms, average electricity bills increased by 30% and average gas bills increased by 78%. Overwhelmingly, this is due to increases in wholesale fossil fuel energy prices; and as reserves decrease and global consumption increases, those prices are going to continue to rise.

In addition, the Big Six have been putting retail prices up when wholesale prices rise, but not bringing them down as far or as fast when wholesale prices fall.

They have also been increasing the value of dividend payments to shareholders, and the share of profits paid out to shareholders each year. For example, Centrica (who own British Gas) approved a 12% increase in dividend payments at the same time as British Gas customers’ bills went up by at least 16%; and in 2010 more than two thirds (67%) of SSE’s profits were returned to shareholders as dividends. If, instead, SSE had just paid the FTSE100 average for profits paid as dividends they could have cut electricity customers’ bills by £40 that year.

So what can you do? Well, you can support our call for progressive support for truly renewable energy by signing our petition.

And you can also think about joining the revolution, by switching to green energy. We believe that Ecotricity and Good Energy are the best practice clean energy suppliers.

Note: this article was written by Hackney Friends of the Earth